I just wanted to remind you of two events:

1. It's still not too late to sign up for my newsletter and read the free paranormal romance novella serial A Happily Ever After of Her Own. You can sign up here or you can use the form below. There are only two chapters left to go!

2. Fellow Samhain writers and I are hosting a Kindle contest, with our editor coordinating the effort. (FYI – I write contemporary romance under another name, Angelle Trieste.)

Prize? A Kindle (duh *wink*) preloaded with books from participating authors.

The contest is open to anyone anywhere in the world. So even if you're not in the States, come on and join us!

Here's the official statement on the contest website:

I wanted to make it convenient for people and make it easier for people to participate, soooo…. we will not be doing the contest on Saturdays and Sundays, and we will not being doing the contest on Thanksgiving (US), or Black Friday (the day after US Thanksgiving). Monday through Fridays only. :) I think not doing it on the weekends is a given this time of year…we all have a lot of holiday things going on, like parties and shopping. Woo hoo!

Now, remember, in order to participate, you'll have to post a relevant comment (No, ‘Hi! That's great.', etc.), and you'll have to answer the scavenger hunt question. Do not post your answer in the comments! There will be a link to a form to answer the scavenger hunt question and to give me your name and address. After all, I'll need to know where to ship the preloaded Kindle, right? Posting you answer in the comments will cause the comment to be deleted and the commenter to be disqualified. Not just from that day, but from the entire contest. So, yeah, you don't want to do that. :)

So here's the schedule for the rest of the contest:

November 23 :: Kelly Jamieson
November 24 :: Angelle Trieste (me!)
November 25 :: Dawn Brown
November 30 :: J.K. Coi
December 1 :: Cheryel Hutton
December 2 :: Rita Oberlies
December 3 :: Kate Johnson
December 4 :: Leah Braemel
December 7 :: Deidre Knight
December 8 :: Cooper Davis
December 9 :: Kimberly Nee
December 10 :: Joely Sue Burkhart
December 11 :: T.A. Chase
December 14 :: Samantha Sommersby

You only need to answer one scavenger question to enter, but the more you answer, the more chances you get. So don't be shy! Participate for your chance to win a Kindle! The website is editortera.wordpress.com.

Good luck!

Fellow Samhain writers and I are hosting a Kindle contest, with our editor coordinating the effort. (FYI – I write contemporary romance under another name, Angelle Trieste.)

Prize? A Kindle (duh *wink*) preloaded with books from participating authors.

The contest is open to anyone anywhere in the world. So even if you're not in the States, come on and join us!

Here's the official statement on the contest website:

I wanted to make it convenient for people and make it easier for people to participate, soooo…. we will not be doing the contest on Saturdays and Sundays, and we will not being doing the contest on Thanksgiving (US), or Black Friday (the day after US Thanksgiving). Monday through Fridays only. :) I think not doing it on the weekends is a given this time of year…we all have a lot of holiday things going on, like parties and shopping. Woo hoo!

Now, remember, in order to participate, you'll have to post a relevant comment (No, ‘Hi! That's great.', etc.), and you'll have to answer the scavenger hunt question. Do not post your answer in the comments! There will be a link to a form to answer the scavenger hunt question and to give me your name and address. After all, I'll need to know where to ship the preloaded Kindle, right? Posting you answer in the comments will cause the comment to be deleted and the commenter to be disqualified. Not just from that day, but from the entire contest. So, yeah, you don't want to do that. :)

So here's the schedule:

You only need to answer one scavenger question to enter. The more you answer, the more chances you get. So don't be shy! Participate for your chance to win a Kindle! The website is editortera.wordpress.com.

Good luck!

On Friday November 13 at around 1:30 a.m. Japan Time, I found Shiro lying on her side under her favorite big wheel in the green cage. When I touched her, she was cold and didn't respond at all. I thought she was dead, but Hero Material said she was still breathing.

He took her out of the cage and held her gently between his hands. They're almost always warmer than mine, and we thought maybe if we could make her warm again, she'd be okay.

After all, that courageous hamster had fought and won against many illnesses.

I still remember the first time I saw her in a local pet store. She was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen: pure white except for the soft velvety gray ear tips and gorgeous sparkling black eyes. She lived in a small glass cage with Kuro. We were initially going to get only one hamster, but I thought maybe she'd be lonely by herself. So we bought Kuro as well.

They were my first pets. That night as they were playing in their new cage with a wheel (their old one didn't have one) I couldn't take my eyes off of them. They were hilarious, active and utterly adorable. I was in love.

Subsequent discovery that Kuro is a male hamster shocked me — he was supposed to be a she! — but Shiro and Kuro got along so well I didn't have the heart to return him to the pet shop. Nor did Hero Material. We kept them both. Shiro delivered her first litter: Peanut and Buttercup.

Then a disease ravaged her small body. It was a diarrhea caused by some parasites. I don't know how she got it, but it destroyed her appetite on top of everything else. She refused to eat her favorite food — green veggies, nuts, seeds, etc. At one point, her weight dropped all the way from 55 grams to 17 grams. When she collapsed on her side, we thought this was it…until she jumped back up.

She never made a full recovery — the diarrhea never stopped even though her weight reached around 36 grams. That's still very small for a hamster. Her mate Kuro weighs around 50-55 grams.

Small or not, sick or not, she was a fierce mother. I remember the time when I decided to clean her cage after she had her second litter. It was getting very stinky, and her babies were old enough that I could clean her cage without turning her against them. When she realized that her babies were exposed to some alien presence, she gathered them together and covered them with her own body, while giving me the death glare.

She always gave her affection to us generously. When I put my hand near her, she placed her paw on my fingertip and said her little hamster hello. She nose-kissed Hero Material many times, and she loved the attention she got from us.

So as she lay cold on Hero Material's palm, we took Kuro out, so they could say good bye. He groomed her cold blue belly and petted her a little.

I don't know how long we held her. I started to feel anxious because I saw blood where she'd lain down. She had no wound or open cut on her, and because where the stain was, she'd probably vomited the blood before we found her.

Finally when her paws started twitching and her whispers flickered, we thought maybe…maybe she'd come back to us just like she'd done many times before. However, it turned out to be her last breath.

Most winter white hamsters live for 2-3 years. She was only one year old.

We placed a big cashew nut between her forepaws. Cashews were her favorite food in the whole world. We didn't want her to be hungry. Then we wrapped her in a long swath of scentless white tissue. It was her favorite thing to make nests with. We wanted her to have something she liked so she can make a home for herself. Then we placed her in a white box in which our wedding ring came and buried her under a beautiful willow tree by the river, so every time we walk by, we can say hello. So that she knows she'll always be remembered and loved.

Farewell, Shiro.

I've been a bit distracted with several things.

First — I came down with a cold. (I still have it, although it's not as bad as it used to be.) Hero Material got it first, then lovingly gave it to me. I think he called it “early Christmas present”. Hmmm. But he paid for the doctor's visit and medicine, so I guess all's forgiven.

Second — I decided to do NaNo. Well, technically I'm not working on a novel from scratch, but more like trying to finish Acts 2-4. I've written like tons of different pre-drafts and scenes and snippets, but none of them really gelled or gave me any insight into my characters. Hence NaNo.

Scarily enough I'm writing many of my scenes out of order right now. I've never jumped back and forth like that, but with WriteWayPro it's easy to rearrange scenes, etc. So I'm giving myself permission to write later scenes first. Once I got over the initial resistance, I realized that it was actually helpful for me to do it. I can see better why Angel and Mikhail fell in love in the first place and why they thought it couldn't work, etc., and why they broke up but why they're together again now, etc. etc. etc.

BTW — is it wrong for me to like the ruthless Russian mafia boss more than the U.S. bureaucrats in my story?

Third — My netbook is having the same issue it did last time. It's been, like, a week since Samsung fixed it. They took it back — again, very courteous and apologetic. So I'm without a netbook for another week or two until they repair it. (Hopefully permanently…)

Fourth — I reformatted my Macbook this week. I use Apple Boot Camp to use XP on it — that's my preferred OS; the Mac OS just does not feel very intuitive to me — but BCXP refused to shut down correctly for two weeks in a row. It's partially my fault for having installed all kinds of stupid programs that I shouldn't have in the first place. (And the fact that when I first created the HD partitions and so on I think I did something wrong b/c the driver installations, etc. didn't go very smoothly…)

Anyway, 30 hours later, it's done, and my computer's faster. Yay. :)

Fifth — Hero Material and I started on another drama series: Dexter. It's just so twisted, I love it! We're still on the first season. Can't wait to watch the rest.

Finally — the Olympic season!!!!! I'm a huge fan of figure skating (have been since Kristi Yamaguchi's heyday), and I've watched the first Grand Prix events. Yuna Kim rocks my world, and I'm so thrilled to see Shen and Zhao skate again. Shen and Zhao are my sentimental favorite in pairs, and I want them to achieve their dream of winning the Olympic gold medal. It'll be a first for China.

I'm also rooting for Yuna since I adore her skating, and it too will be the first Olympic figure skating medal for Korea.

OTOH — I'm heart-broken about Mao Asada. She's just imploded this season. I don't even know if she can make it to the Grand Prix Final, and it won't be the same without her. I have my own theories on why she's not doing so well this season based on the media coverage. Gambatte, Mao!

Oh and if you're wondering why I don't seem all that interested in Evegeny Plushenko's comeback…well, it's because I don't think he's all that exciting to watch. I mean, yeah, his jumps are great and he can do some interesting footwork, but something about his skating just leaves me cold. I also suppose it's because I still long for Alexei Yagudin's awesomeness — great jumps, great footwork, superb artistry. Unless he messes up unbelievably, I think Plushy will win the gold medal. Brian Joubert's been incredibly unprepared and erratic at Trophee Eric Bompard, and Oda can't seem to land quad jumps consistently. Evan…well, he reminds me of Todd Eldridge — another dull dull skater.

As for why I don't care about Sasha Cohen's comeback…well, I'll believe when I see it. I think it's nothing more than a publicity stunt on her part, especially since all Sasha seems to talk about is her “injuries”. If she does show up at Skate America, Yuna will crush her, and maybe even someone like Rachael Flatt and Fumie Suguri may be able to beat her.

My prediction? Sasha withdraws from Skate America, shows up at the U.S. Nationals and gets a spot on the Olympic team. The international judges are brutal, and with the more severe crackdown on underrotations and wrong edges, Sasha won't do very well. But American judges at the Nationals will most likely overscore her. I hope Sasha proves me wrong, but I'm not very optimistic.

How about you? How have you been doing? Any cool plans? Are you excited about the Vancouver Olympic Games?

I know I talk about my hamsters a lot, and some of the blog pictures are a bit low quality, so Hero Material took some good ones.

Here are three pictures of Shiro & Peanut. Shiro is a pearl white Siberian hamster, and Peanut is the first son she had with Kuro.

First up — Shiro. This is her surveying her kingdom. Hero Material and I call her Kuiin Hamu (Queen Hamster).

The next two are pictures of Peanut. He's very even-tempered and sweet. He adores eating egg yolks, and as a matter of fact, he's eating one in one of the pictures. (He looks very ferocious when he eats.)

Aren't they just adorable? :wub:

A couple of people asked me if I've ever used WriteWayPro and if so, what I think of it.

It's my fourth day using the program. I think it's a fine program, and it does what you want it to do.

Strengths:

• Everything you need for your writing project is right there on the screen, so it's very easy to keep things organized.
• It's very easy to move scenes around or reference certain scenes, etc.
• It starts fast.
• You can set it to open to your last active chapter or scene, so you can start working right away.
• It's not that difficult to learn.
• Customer support is great. I've seen some really crappy customer support, but this is excellent. I'm happy with the response time and so on.
• Word count report and analysis are fabulous. I love looking at them and see how many words I need to write to hit my target completion date, etc. (I no longer need to mess with Excel, although I adore Excel…)

Things WriteWayPro can improve on:

• It's currently lacking auto-save, so you have to remember to save every so often.
• The composition screen shouldn't be in print layout (to use Wordspeak). It's a personal preference, but I find it very distracting to see empty headers and footers as I go from one page to the next. Since the composition font and the final manuscript font are different anyway (and lovely WriteWayPro formats everything for you automatically!), I don't see any point to having a ton of blank space on the screen. Besides, it really breaks the flow as I draft and/or edit. I wish I could hide the blank space like in Word.
• I'm not sure if it's just me or Word 2007 or what, but when I export the entire manuscript into rtf and open it in Word, the text looks justified, and the right side is smooth instead of jagged. But if I copy paste the entire manuscript to another blank Word doc, the format comes out fine. It's not a deal breaker, but it's something to be aware of if this kind of stuff really really matters to you.
• Unlike Word, which can check for typos as you type, WriteWayPro checks typos only if you click on the spell-check button. I find this to be somewhat annoying because I like to fix typos as I draft / edit.
• This didn't bug me, but it may bug you: the user interface is very basic and not as polished and fancy as the latest Microsoft Office. But it does the job, and I don't think it's something WriteWayPro should put any priority on addressing. If you simply must have the slickest GUI, however, this may bother you.

So there it is. Any questions? Have you used WriteWayPro or any similar software? If so, what do you think about it? If you've never used any, why not?

So the FTC doesn't come after me, here it is again: I'm not in any way shape or form related to or employed by WriteWayPro. I never received any monetary compensation for this post. I've downloaded WriteWayPro, and I am currently drafting my novel with it.