I've an overwhelming need for a magical clock...

It’s been a while since I blogged. I’ve been weighed down by an incredible amount of work. If you get a job offer to become a weekly newspaper reporter, particularly in sports, reject the offer—especially if another job with normal hours is a distinct possibility.

I’ve not been able to finish the editing of book two of my Larenia’s Shadow trilogy for months now. I have just one hundred pages left to edit on Thief’s Coin. Get that done, and then I can give it a read-through to ensure the novel still makes sense with all the edits, some of them extensive.

Thanks to a new Postal Service program that resulted in last week’s newspapers being a couple of days late to subscribers, the publisher decided to move deadlines up a day. I’m writing this blog on Sunday, March 20. Normally I’d be writing sports stories and using Photoshop to prepare photos for the paginator. But I did all that yesterday. In fact, I wrote up both news and sports stories. Hour-wise, that’s from 9 a.m. Saturday until 1:30 a.m. today.

I wanted to transition from sports to the news side so I’d have more time to finish editing Thief’s Coin and renew writing chapters for the third book, Assassins’ Lair. But the new sports editor quit after only one week, citing too much driving and too much work. So now I’m doing both jobs.

Next weekend I’m flying to Las Vegas to meet up with my girlfriend and shower together in the proverbial Fountain of Youth, letting it rejuvenate our five-decade-old bodies, becoming—at least in our minds—twenty-somethings once more. But we can’t play all the time…she lives in Henderson and will have to work some of the time. So that distressing fact gave me an idea. I can bring along my laptop and finish those final one hundred pages.

So I can enjoy two kinds of romance…romance with a wonderful woman and the romance of writing books.

The first book of the trilogy, The Emperor’s Mistress, has been out in print since September of last year. Now I can actually visualize emailing Thief’s Coin to my publisher, Wings ePress, sometime in the next few months. For a while I was beginning to wonder if I would ever find the time to finish the novel.

But I still need to find a way to resume working on Assassins’ Lair. I’ve written several chapters, even posted them on an online writers workshop where I received helpful critiques. I participated religiously in the Online Writers Workshop of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror from 2002 until last year when the weekly newspaper workload took away all spare time for creative writing. Sadly, at the end, I had even broken the workshop’s 11^th Commandment…thou shalt return critiques to writers who critique your chapters.

Ultimately, the answer is to find a job that will give me back a private life where I can work on books, go out to a restaurant occasionally, sometimes see a movie. In January I had started to look for a job in the Vegas area…that is until the workload made that impossible. I need to find a magical watch that can stop time for everyone but me so I can resume that job search. Anyone know of any pawnshops where I can buy one?