Reporting in, as promised...
First, though - thanks to Larissa and Sheri for the support and also thanks to Alex for her help with "clattertrap" and Lynn, Sheri and Gina for their comments. Lynn - you just may need that extra long ruler - I'm the Princess of Procrastination *vbg*.

Ok - things are almost back to normal here. Got my contest entry done, used up most of my credits at Ancestry.co.uk and even managed to throw ingredients in the bread machine so my dh has sandwich bread for the week. He's on the early news shift for the next six weeks (meaning he's up at 2:45 each weekday morning). Sounds awful to most of us, but he thrives on it! Is even taking the motorcycle in rather than driving the car.

On Saturday morning I got my Hearts Through History entry back (gotta love contests that let you email the entry) and was thrilled with my scores and the comments. Was also shocked to figure out that my score of 92% wasn't anywhere close to high enough for finalling! Then again, I was a hard-ass TA at university and rarely give perfect marks to anything I judge *g*. No matter - though finalling would have been great (especially as the editor for my category was from NAL) and I'd entered with the hope of making the cut, I'm not really disappointed. My story is set in partially in France and contains some phrases in French, so I was curious to see what the judges would think. They were pretty impressed :-) Which made me breathe a sigh of relief. Also my story is pretty heavy on the action, at least at the beginning, so I lost marks on sexual tension. But apparently I've set it up well enough to convince the reader that will follow and to have either the hero or heroine thinking of anything sexual at that point in the story would be pretty unrealistic. He's just rescued her from prison - she hasn't had a bath in two months! But once she cleans up, he pays a little more attention *g*.

Anyway, I'm babbling at this point. My chapter hosted a great speaker yesterday - Molly O'Keefe, who presented her workshop The First Three Chapters - The Key to a Sale. It was fantastic. She broke things down into several elements and illustrated with sound examples. My fingers were flying over my AlphaSmart keys in an effort to keep up! And a lot of it ties into stuff I've learned through FDin30D.

And speaking of which, I have to get started on this week's goals - my scene capsules. Especially important are those for the scenes I've discovered I need to add to the book! Scenes I mentioned in my synopsis but discovered when revising I'd forgotten to write :-O Plus some others that have come about through story revisions.

That said, I'd best finish here for today and get on with accounting entries. Can't do my own work till I've finished office stuff first!

Teresa