A very nice lady emailed me to ask about Three Wishes. My apologies, but my email system ate your email as I tried to respond. It is NEVER a bother to receive email from folks, and yes I do read everything that comes through the contact form (except manuscript critiques. I cannot do those for a variety of reasons, not the least being liability issues).

Anyway, THREE WISHES (Vegas cover) is a straight reprint of the older blue cover. I wasn’t asked to make any changes or revisions to the story at all. I’m sure there are a few things I would tweak– we writers are hardly ever completely satisfied with our stories when we turn them in.

So basically, if you already have the first edition copy of TW, you don’t need to get this one (not that I’d mind if you did, I’d like to retire from the day job to write fiction full time for y’all.) Of course, if you didn’t get a copy of the 2004 version, feel free to pick up the mass market version in October. And tell your friends, and yo mama ‘n’ ‘em.

And to the nice lady who sent the email, please send another. Thanks so much for reading and liking my books. I appreciate it!

PS: The fabulous Beverly Jenkins will be on the Today Show tomorrow morning. Check her out!

The Arm and Hammer toothpaste…for cleaning dry erase boards.

I mean I sprayed the damn thing with the recommended brand cleaner and scrubbed until my arm hurt, and the stupid marker STILL wouldn’t come off. Then I remembered that I’d heard somewhere that toothpaste would work. So I had a trial size of the A&H baking soda toothpaste that I wasn’t using (cause it tastes like ass, you know) and I put some on the board. Damned if the marker didn’t come right off.

So if you have a dry-erase board filled with notes that are no longer needed but seemingly forever ingrained, take some white toothpaste to it. /endorsement.

And no, I wasn’t really procrastinating…

I put up the titles and due dates of my current WIPs. Directly across from my worktable. Okay, above the TV so I can’t help but see them there like the freakin’ Sword of Damocles. No pressure. But I also started a chart for THE SHARPEST EDGE, and will do one for CURSE OF SHADOWS this weekend. These are based on the storyboard workshop I saw at GRW’s July meeting, led by Berta Platas and Nancy Knight.

I’m going to use post-its and notecards to plot out both these stories, after i write out the detailed synopses for both. I know basically how both stories go, but not the turn by turns. So that happens this weekend–after I buy storage bins to hide the clutter on the shelves in my office. Reducing the clutter on the outside will hopefully eliminate some of the clutter on the inside. I got a lot to do, and not a bunch of time to do it in.

Please fire your ad agency. Why? Because of this commerical:

Most women in America wouldn’t have said, “one sheeter,” and gone to clean up. They would have said, “Looking at the spill won’t wipe it up, jerk-wads” then tossed the roll of paper towels at the offender’s head.

Millions of women would have had a good laugh and then gone to buy your product. Instead they’ll remember how you turned them into the servant for their clumsy menfolk and move on to another paper towel.

(Yes, I’m procrastinating)

This made me grin and cry like an idiot at work…and I have my boss to thank. Share this everywhere if you can. Maybe we won’t kill each other yet!


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

It’s research time,folks!

Tonight at 9 PM EDT, CNN will air the first part of a two-part series called Black in America.  There was a preview showing here in Atlanta last week, but I was unable to attend.  Tonight’s showing is about black women and family.  If you follow the link I posted above, it will take you to a page with all sorts of links including Vanessa Williams and Whoopi Goldberg talking about being black in America, discussions on hair (cause that is HUGE) and interracial relationships.

If you want to create a real composite of a contemporary black woman, I suggest watching this show.  They even have a discussion guide you can use.

Two blog posts that I agreed wholeheartedly with today, so I’m linking to them for your reading pleasure:

Regina Carlysle posted about her discovery that AA romance is shelved differently. Hey, I don’t care that she’s late to the table–she’s blogging about it and building awareness. And wants to actually do something about it. Rally people to the flag, gurlfriend!

Dear Author posted a reader’s manifesto of the Top Ten Things a publisher could do to help readers buy books. My favorites are 10, 9, 5, 1.

1. Label the books in a series. As a reader, I want to read a series in order. I can’t stand to pick up a book I think is next only to discover they’re referencing incidents that happened in a book I haven’t read yet. 5. Make the covers more distinctive. As a reader, nothing pisses me off more than to snag a book thinking it’s the latest and greatest by an author, only to discover I already have the book at home. 9. Price hardcover ebooks at reasonable prices. As a reader, I don’t understand why an electronic version of a book is the same price or slightly lower than the hardcover. ($10 for an ebook? Are you smoking crack?).  I’ll keep buying from the smaller publishers, thankyouverymuch.

10. Ask bookstores to shelve Romance with Romance regardless of the race.  If you don’t know why I chose this one, well, you must be new here.

Ah, nothing like a rejection to keep a body humble.

There are still two more agent proposals out there for the contemporary, and two editor proposals out there for the anthology.  If I get passes from the other two agents, I’ll probably think about whether or not to submit the contemporary idea directly to publishers.

In the meantime, I’m judging contest entries and working on my shorts.  Not only did I just find out that next Monday will be a major pest cpntrol operation, requiring me to empty everything out of every cabinet, drawer and countertop, I also discovered that the “repair” that got my air conditioner working resulted in the thermostat being incorrectly wired.  This caused the outside AC unit to run constantly–EVEN THOUGH THE INSIDE UNIT WAS POWERED OFF.  That caused my electric bill to QUADRUPLE TWO MONTHS IN A ROW.  Yeah, let me shake the bankroll out of my couch to pay that.
Oh, joy unspeakable joy.

So I celebrated with Chicken Nuggets and a large sweet tea, with an apple pie thrown in.  Yes, I had large fries–how can you go to Mickey D’s and not get fries?

On a totally unrelated note, I saw this story that  made me want to set a story in DC, if only so that I can have a group of girlfriends go to this spa.  Would you do that?

I gotta tell ya, I don’t even get into water I can’t see through or touch the bottom of, for exactly this reason.  And they want me to pay them $50 for this?

Saw the Dark Knight Friday.  I know some people thought it was too long, but me, being the cheapskate I am, felt like I got my $10 worth.  The Pencil Trick will linger in my mind as a prime example of a way to show, don’t tell.  The Nolans didn’t need to tell me how badass Joker is;  I knew as soon as he made that pencil disappear what type of person he is.

For the record, I see why some folks are afraid of clowns.  And despite my initial reservations, Heath Ledger did an unbelievable job portraying the psychotic and sadistic anarchist.  I also see why people are saying the O-word.  Good writing, good acting, good mood setting.  However, if you don’t like dark films, skip this.  It was definitely dark–my reasoning for liking it, ut probably not others’ cup of tea.
Saw previews for the upcoming Terminator movie, but at this point, I can’t drum up any enthusiasm for it.  I did see the trailer for The Watchmen and it looks like it might be pretty good.

So today I was going to post about how I’d sent out an email query on Saturday.  Since I just got the rejection email back, I won’t bother.  Still two agent queries out there, and probably gearing up to send another one before week’s end.

Other than the query and the tracking spreadsheet, I caught up on sleep this weekend.  I am now in the midst of judging a contest and my primary focus is to complete that and this short that I’m donating to the Phaze Coming Together: At Last anthology to benefit Amnesty International, and a novella for Parker Publishing.

Last month, I blogged at Blogging in Black about Pressure and Creativity.  Inspired by an article in Scientific American Mind magazine, I shared four key competencies of creative people:

1. Capturing. Preserving new ideas as they come to you (and without judging them.) Most of us do this with our idea files, either in notebooks or electronic folders on our computers, or sticky notes attached to the inside of our windshields.
2. Challenging. Giving ourselves tough problems to solve (also known as a “plot” in author lingo.) This can enable that “out of the box” thinking all writers need.  I call it the “what if” scenario.  As in, “What if your character was placed in a situation in which she had the do the last thing she swore she’d ever be caught doing?  What would it be and how would it happen?”
3. Broadening. Diversifying your knowledge by learning/experiencing new things. How many of us get fired up about something we’ve seen or read and decide that we have to include it in our stories?
4. Surrounding. Managing physical and social environments. Basically, the more interesting and diverse your world, the more interesting and diverse your ideas.

This month I’m going to continue that theme a bit.  At least, I think if I work it out in my brain for the e-world to see, I’ll have a better understanding of how to manage my creative process.

My next post at Blogging in Black (www.blogginginblack.com) will be this coming Sunday.

This morning I decided to do some organizing of my queries, so that I no longer have convoluted posts like the one I made a couple of weeks ago.

I found a simple spreadhseet in Microsoft Works, A Book Log.  It’s supposed to be used to track students’ book reading progress, so it was easy enough to change the student name to editor/agent name, title is my submission project, then whether it was a query letter or full proposal, email or paper submission, response, and expected turnaround time.

I want to keep it simple, because the idea is to write and submit, not spend all my time populating a database.  While searching for a site I remembered tracking agent response times, I came across LitMatch.com.  It’s a free service that you can use to track your submissions.  From their site:

When you record a submission using our easy to use submission form, LitMatch keeps track of that submission for you, including when you sent your query, whether you sent it by mail or email, and which agent you sent it to. When you get a reply, LitMatch keeps track of any follow-ups you send and reports back on how agents are responding to your work.

You can also compare your response times against those reported by other users, and use reported statistics to determine which agents you want to approach next.

I don’t know anything about it, and therefore can’t make any type of recommendation or endorsement of the site’s products and services.  Read the privacy policy and the About Us page and see if the service is right for you.