Still Here!!!

I know, I know. I'm supposed to be posting at some sort of vaguely regulated intervals. But I'm not. As evidenced by my absence.

What I've been up to:

Working! And loving work.

Weddings... not mine (yeah, right :)

The Writer's Voice Contest! I got four requests from participating agents and was ninja'd by an after-contest lurking agent. *squee*

Getting rejected... one from one of the WV agents (very fast turnaround, and form letter, so they were very obviously totally uninterested) and one by a agent I had queried some time ago. She was very nice, but her rejection left me reaching for chocolate because she said things like 'the story wasn't progressing as quickly as I would like' and 'the characters needed further development' in addition to having issues with a few other things which led me to believe that she just didn't 'get' the story, in part. It wouldn't have bothered me nearly so much, but I'd just finished laboriously plowing through a book that was 'acclaimed' that I found INCREDIBLY boring (nothing happened. I mean NOTHING) and which had completely flat characters, so I inadvertently committed that Cardinal sin of looking at the 'acclaimed' book, and my own ms and thinking WHAT DID THEY DO THAT I HAVEN'T??? IT'S NOT FAIR!!! Yeah, fast forward to a few hours and I got over it. Though I AM eager to hear something from other agents and see if they say anything about story progression and character development. Because that'll tell me whether I need to check myself or not.

Sending out queries!

And finally, WRITING!!! I'm about 3/4 done with the first draft of Rivana of the Twains and it feels SO FREAKING GOOD to be writing again! I'm still not sure if Rivana has what it takes (or the potential to have what it takes) to be marketable, but I love the story and we'll see how it looks after the first transcription edit.

Oh, also, I am now the mother of a pitcher plant, named Bruce, and Venus fly trap named Hannibal... Pictures to follow at a later date.