Typing With Wet Claws: Z is for Zoomies Edition

Hello, all. Skye here, for another Feline Friday. My day started early this morning, and, because of that, so did Anty’s. What happened was that I had a case of the zoomies. That means I had too much energy, and I needed to run. A lot. Very fast. I needed Anty to know that I was running, so I would run up to her, chirp, and run away again. I kept that up until she knew it was time for up, which means time for feeding me. As you can imagine, I worked up quite the appetite with all that running. Uncle thinks it is cute when I get the zoomies, but he is not the one who has to deal with the aftermath, which is usually my, um, stuff. Needless to say, Anty required more tea than usual to get her brain into gear after a start like that.

In case you missed them, Anty has two posts at Heroes and Heartbreakers this week. Her post about the second-to-last episode of this season of Sleepy Hollow is here, and her post about the first book in Charis Michaels’ Bachelor Lords of London series, The Earl Next Door, is here. They look like this:

 

There is a new member of the family that joined us this week. The Jinhao fountain pen Anty ordered online came in the mail. She was super excited, because she did not know it came with a converter, which meant she did not have to wait for the cartridges to arrive. She could ink it right away, which is exactly what she did. The ink is purple, which is very good for writing in Anty’s daily pages book. Here is the pen, resting on that book. Anty gets grumbly when she reaches the end of a two-page spread, because she usually wants to keep going, but that only means she is ready for the real writing of the day.

deskscape, with new pen and daily pages book

 

Yes, that is Henry VIII peeking out of the top of the Paris notebook. Anty likes to live dangerously. This is one of the perils of being a historical romance writer with various interests. Although Anty does not write her books in her daily pages book, sometimes, she writes about them. That is kind of like zoomies of the brain, when she has so much in her head that she has to dump some of it out on paper. It is fitting that she does that with a fountain pen, because filling those can sometimes be messy, the same as it is putting things down on the page for the very first time. Also, going over the same thing multiple times, exploring new layers, from different angles, until Anty gets what she needs.

Another way of getting things out of her head and onto a page is with her art journals. Those do not always involve words at all, and the supplies smell very interesting, so I like to stay close when she is working on those. This is a current page in progress:

Anty says that the Picadilly paper is not very good at taking wet media, so she probably will not use it again in this book. That only means she can get a different book, with watercolor paper, so she can use wet media in that one. Pencils and stencils and magazine papers are better matches for this sort of paper. Anty has put more things on this spread since this picture was taken, but we do not have pictures of that new layer right now. There will probably be more by the time she is happy with it and ready to move on to the next spread. She also needs to find stencils that can make different shapes from the ones she used here.

It is kind of like that with writing. In the stage where Anty is with Her Last First Kiss, the bullet point draft, it is only when Anty drops things onto the page and mushes them around, that she can tell what the story still needs. This week, she found out she misplaced a certain character for several chapters, so that, when she needed that character later on in the book, she had no idea where that character would be. This will involve reading through what is already there and finding out how fast that character’s injury would heal, so she knows if they would be able to move around on their own or not. She also is working on a scene where she knows the beginning and end points, but does not know the middle of the scene. She has worked both ends against the middle before, so that is not a new thing, even if it can be aggravating at times.

Anty is also getting ready for the Let Your Imagination Take Flight conference, which will be at the end of the month. If you are going to be there, Anty would love to talk to you. She will have pictures of me on her phone, if that is an incentive. Maybe even some videos.

That is about it for this week, so, until next time, I remain very truly yours,

Until next week…

Skye O’Malley Hart-Bowling
(the kitty, not the book)