Hey everybody,

I feel like I’m entering the confessional. I should probably be saying something along the lines of:

“Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned.  It’s been…*gulp*… 2 years and five months since I last updated my website.”

Um…yeah. About that. Lemme explain.

In June 2007 I was riding high.  My very first published story **ever** had been released by Amber Quill Press, to generally favorable reviews.  My spouse had back surgery and I stayed home with him for 6 weeks, intending to get the sequel out and maybe get started on some others. I committed to AQP for more stories (until recently, featured on my Coming Soon page,) and settled down to enjoy the ride.

Then my spouse – my life partner, my best friend – got sick.

He just wasn’t bouncing back from the surgery like we hoped. He felt tired & weak all the time, healed slowly, started dropping weight, and began suffering debilitating migraines up to 4 or 5 times a week. We went to doctors, then specialists, ruled out cancer and meningitis, and then began the absolutely horrid routine of going to see health specialists who don’t really know what’s wrong with you, so start prescribing stuff to see what helps.  Some meds made him a little better, some meds made him a lot worse, and nothing touched the migraines, which were of the “I’d almost rather be dead than suffer through this” variety.

This state of affairs went on for, no kidding, eighteen months. By late 2008 he was forty pounds underweight, literally skin and bones, and not just housebound but bedridden. I was beside myself.

Some people are able to use their writing as an escape, as a sort of therapy for the stress in their lives. Unfortunately, my well of creativity is tied in to my mental well-being. And between worrying if I was going to come home one day and find myself a widow, and staying on top of a truly insane work schedule (from whence came the health insurance), I couldn’t write a word for almost two years.

Then a miracle happened. In a last ditch effort, we abandoned our normal primary care physician and found a holistic naturopath (a real medical doctor, yes, but one less interested in throwing drugs at us to treat symptoms and more interested in finding the actual cause of the health problems). After two visits, a series of really thorough blood tests, and about three hours of interviewing my spouse, she diagnosed that his migraines were caused by severe food allergies, which in turn were exacerbated by lead poisoning (he had scraped and painted our old turn-of-the century lead-paint-ridden house before we moved down to AZ). She figured his body had been handling the detox on its own until the surgery, then his immune system was too vulnerable and couldn’t handle the double job of detoxing him AND healing his back.

We changed his diet – no more dairy, sugar, or wheat flour.  He began a series of chelation treatments to remove the lead from his blood and tissues. After about six months of this, he hasn’t had one migraine, is slowly but surely finding his energy and his joie de vivre, and has regained twenty pounds.

I got my soul mate back, and with it my will to write.

So, yeah. I’m working on Loving Wolf, the sequel to Just Friends. And since I’m no longer constrained to a contest-entry word-count, you can expect all the stuff I wanted to get into in Just Friends to show up in Loving Wolf. For Eli and Grant, falling in love was just the beginning.

2008 sucked like a Hoover WindTunnell vacuum. 2009 sucked much less. 2010, I hope, will be a gentle exhalation, preferably through pursed lips and accompanied by a pleasing sound.

Yeah, people, I’m whistling while I work.  And provided AQP still wants my stuff, I hope that in the not-too-distant future you, too, will be whistling while you read the further adventures of Grant & Eli.

Thanks for sticking with me, readers. You guys are the best.

Anne 

January 8, 2010

So, I mainlined the first season of The Sentinel last night, after reading much fanfic (okay, fine, it was slash) from the fandom. Thanks to many fantastic writers and websites I had a pretty good idea of the what the show was about, so figured I'd better watch it.

I finished S1 about 2 this morning, and I have several thoughts (posted after the cut) but there were two which really stood out in my mind, which were:

1.  "Man, Kripke gives me Sam & Dean together in practically *every scene*, why didn't PetFly do that with Jim & Blair? Those two guys have great chemistry." ( I have evidently been far too spoiled by Supernatural);

and

2. OMG Blair's MOUTH. OMG look at his MOUTH. I want to do wicked, nasty things to that mouth - I want to see that mouth do wicked, nasty things to Jim ON NETWORK TV. I thought Spike & Dean had mouths on them, but Blair's? JESUS.

Just look:
 

SEE????

Ah, writing. How I love thee. With the high you give me, you should sell on the street for a thousand dollars an ounce, er, sentence.

Yeah.

Writing-wise, this weekend/week rocks. I've got the sequel for Just Friends all figured out and am rewriting my rough draft to firm up motivation and have the climax make sense. The dark moment is dark - my poor boys! I've also, just for fun, gone to town on my first het erotic romance The Taming of the Wolf, which I need to send in next month for an October release. I had a little worry, I admit - I've been writing gaysex for the past six months and was a little concerned about flexing the het muscles. 
Heh. Shouldn't have worried. So far it's *smokin hot* and I don't even have the characters in bed yet. 
(You know you've got your porn-fu going when you read something you just wrote and it makes your own thighs clench. Whew!)

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. I've started, thanks to JaneDavitt's excellent work, reading Sentinel fanfiction. I went ahead and ordered the first season on DVD, but since I met the guys by reading SenSlash, I'm afraid I'm going to watch the show and keep going, "Okay, this is all well and good, but when do Jim and Blair have sex?"

So, for my meager yet hopefully growing flist - if you read SenSlash (Jim/Blair, of course) and have recs, could you send them my way? I found 852 Prospect and a lot of its good, but I'm having trouble separating the wheat from the chaff.

Father's Day was great - (Mr. LTK's daughters both called him which made him happy), and work was slightly less chaotic than usual.  On the downside, it's supposed to be 115 degrees tomorrow. God, I hope the A/C holds.

...or at least, that's what I'd conclude given some of the looks the kids are giving me today.

Don't get me wrong, I *like* kids. It's just that 30 or so of them in a 1700 sq. ft building, in 110 degree weather, constantly opening and closing the door and running in and out so the A/C is struggling just to keep the interior of the place at a balmy 85 degrees, while said kids chase each other through the stacks and monopolize the computers playing Quest and Dragonballz so all the adults that want to check their email have to wait 45 minutes for one to free up...

Well.

I only had to ban 7 of the 30 from the library for the day, and the community center next door eventually corralled the rest of the day-program kids inside their facility with a movie and gave us a break. Only six more weeks of summer reading program to go, yay.

In other news - Last of the Mohicans with Daniel Day Lewis has what is the most angst-filled moment in any movie ever - the part where the Huron leader kills the younger sister's Mohican lover, and rather than go with the Huron and live, the younger sister steps off the cliff after him. OMG. I cry EVERY DAMN TIME.

Must go write kinky romance to feel better. *nods*

Posted this morning on the amberheatreaders loop (for the readers of Amber Quill Press' erotica imprint):

In other news, my sequel to Just Friends is reading much better and I hope to have it finished up and sent off by the end of this week. *crosses fingers*