While You Wait...

Things to do while you force yourself to wait and digest a good critique instead of diving right into the edits:

- Tap your foot

- Search YouTube for songs to put on your character play lists

- Check twitter obsessively

- Pretend to read a research book for your next project

- Work on the outline for the next project (that rapidly devolves into squiggles depicting scenes from the current project)

- Play Angry Birds again and try to get three stars on everything

- Read whatever is on top of the TBR list

- Write a blog post about how painful it is to wait and let the ideas percolate

Yeah...

I got a really fantastic critique this morning from Jamie Grey. It's exciting and motivating, and I'm having a very hard time reminding myself that I should let the critique sit for a few days before I go tearing through the ms. But mostly I'm very grateful to have such a fabulous critique group. Don't know where I'd be without my fellow writers. Thanks, you guys!

Bonbons

Well, folks... I'm in trouble.

I've discovered a new hobby, and lately it's about all I want to do. Unfortunately it's expensive (well, not too expensive, but it does require money), time-consuming and fattening. What is it? It's creating these:

These are bonbons that I made a couple weeks ago. They are amazing. Inside is marshmallow fudge (that tastes like it has a hint of caramel). To borrow a quote from a friend, “It's like heaven inside my mouth.”

Of course they're also so full of calories that if I keep making and eating them I'll balloon up 50 pounds in no time. But maybe I'll make some at Christmas and give them all away.

So now that the great bonbon experiment was so successful, I want to try some other things too. In particular I want to see if I can make nougat, caramel and peppermint patties. I might be worried about finding people to give the finished products away to, but I know a whole bunch of teens who would be happy to take them.

Really, the biggest problem is that making candy and chocolates takes all day to accomplish. If I keep heading down that path I'll be in danger of never getting any writing done.

But hey, if the writing thing doesn't work out, at least I know I have a back-up plan now. Couldn't you see me as a chocolatier?