random ramblings

The kids have spent as much time as possible outside playing this past week.  The imp has figured out how to balance on the swings, and enjoys pushing himself with his feet.  The pixie...is too short to climb into the swing and sit, so she lays across the seat on her belly and pretends to fly.

I got slammed with a migraine, yesterday, about half an hour after Odysseus left for work.  The kids, once I got through to them that being noisy hurt Mama's head worse, they were remarkably quiet.  Very good kids.

(Yes, I've still got the headache.  Oddly enough, while bright light makes it hurt worse, the laptop screen doesn't.)

The dog, on the other hand...she refused to come inside.    She refused at eight, at eight thirty, at nine, and at nine thirty.  At which point, I gave up.  I did not feel up to chasing her around her pen and hauling a struggling dog that weighs only ten pounds less than my daughter out of her pen and into the house. 

Besides that, the dog was having so much fun chasing June bugs!  If my head hadn't been hurting so bad, I'd have been giggling watching her. 

The cats were also badly behaved last  night.  They decided that the perfect time to start thundering around and flinging themselves and each other into closed doors was...after I'd gotten the kids to bed, behind those closed doors.  So, the cat that I caught first got tossed into the pantry with the door closed behind her, and...silence.  For a few minutes.  Because then, the other cat found her toy.  And she talks to her toys while she's playing with them.  Loudly.  And then, after I went back to lay down in a dark room, she realized that she was all alone, and started crying.  Loudly.  And refused to come back to where I was...because her toy wasn't already back here.  (She also farts when startled--and she's easily startled--and drools when she's very happy, but those are other faults.)

I am startled, pleased, and impressed with the sales of my books this month!  I've sold (with thanks to everyone who's mentioned my work on their blog) twenty-six copies of The Last Pendragon--the last seven or so after DaddyBear and Larry wrote those awesome reviews.   Another copy of The Godshead sold, too, bringing that total for the month up to three.

I'm currently working on a sequel to The Godshead, tentatively titled either Road Trip or Highway to Tartarus.  I plan to be finished by the end of this month, so that I can write the follow-up (and final book) to The Last Pendragon, titled Resurgent.  That one is outlined in pretty good detail, so I should be able to knock that out this summer, too.  After that, they'll sit on my computer for a while, while I rewrite my fall textbook.  I'm planning on a publication date for the next Modern Gods book sometime in late November, early December, and for Resurgent of sometime next April. 

After that?  I've got about a dozen other projects in mind.  Three more in the Modern Gods world, three more in another world, a redemption story, a horror story, a kind of experimental in form alternate history/reality story, a stand alone, and Lost Girls (which I'm currently stuck on, but I'm sure will come unstuck sooner or later).  In other words...I've got between four and six years' writing worth of books lined up. 

Time to go write.