Suck It Up, Buttercup

I can always count on The Universe to throw me curve balls. Well, plot twists, I guess I'd call them. Those detours not meant to deter you from your destination, but grant you a scenic view along your journey. The latest such curvy road led me to craft the vlog below. Its hashtags might be #random, #thoughtful and #selfmotivation, but what better excuse to stay up even later than usual? (Seemed like a good idea at the time....)

Did you notice how the video tilted as it moved along? #intentional You know, curve balls, curvy road. Yea, see how I embraced that whole notion? LOL

Moving forward with thanks to #thugunicorn...

 

...and love for Mary J. Blige. "I'm gone shine...until my heart stops."

'Til some other random moment compels me to vlog, picture me eagerly awaiting my next curve ball so I can hit it out of the park. :)



Stefanie
www.stefanieworth.com

Doctor, My Eyes!

Life is filled with scares. Big ones, small ones, imaginary ones, and those we ignore. Which brings me to the topic of my eyes. More specifically, my vision.

My eyes have been wonky for months. But in the way that women do, I made a whole list of excuses as to why the matter was no big deal. After all, life’s been hectic. Nobody’s got time for more problems. My brother passed away in October after a long and courageous battle with pancreatic cancer and I had been plodding away at a book for well over a year, taking breaks to tend to my emotional state, take care of my kids and be with family as necessary.

So between frequent bouts of tears and hours of staring at my laptop screen, I emerged from autumn with bloodshot, scratchy eyes that I attributed first to a reaction to new makeup, then to irritation from seasonal allergies and finally to a lack of sleep. Eventually, I caved in and decided to resolve the issue with Visine. Lots of it. And wearing my sunglasses practically all the time outdoors – even on overcast days – because my eyes had become that photosensitive. I teased my daughter that maybe I was turning into a vampire. Ha, ha.

Then I woke up one morning a few weeks ago feeling like there were tree branches under my eyelids trying to gouge out my eyeballs. It was that bad and not at all funny. Hours later, when the pain refused to relent despite warm towels, Visine and Motrin, I did what I should have done months before and made an appointment with my ophthalmologist. 

Turns out, I had something in my eye. Literally: A foreign object was embedded in my cornea. (Insert your favorite emoji here.) So the doctor numbed my eye, took a needle and removed it. No ouch, but much stomach churning. (Again, emoji welcome.) He couldn’t identify it and I had no idea how it found its way past my glasses and deep where it didn’t belong. The thought of the hair-slinging tarantula crossed my mind. While he assured me that a spider wasn’t the culprit, he told me that he thought there was something else going on. Oh.

When I returned a week later to be certain the antibiotics had worked and the cornea was healing, he confirmed his initial suspicions and referred me to a specialist. That guy was the funniest physician EVER, which made me feel a little better about having corneal dystrophy, the dot version specifically. (Here's a video for you visual people.) Turns out it’s possibly genetic, usually shows up between 30 and 70 years old, and most people never know they have it. It doesn’t lead to blindness and generally resolves itself – within a timeframe ranging anywhere from six months to six years.

In the span between that anguished morning of pain and the specialist’s diagnosis, I thought for a hot second about not seeing. What’s it like? I didn’t dwell at all on the “what if?” for myself in particular (because I do believe in speaking things into existence, both good and bad), but I allowed myself to visualize how a sight-challenged writer works. Learning braille to type, using transcription aids, trusting others to help where necessary. It was a fascinating, but brief, exploration that let my imagination explore someone else’s world and, in the end, give thanks for the blessing of good medical care and the ability to pay for all these eye drops I’ll be using until my “dots” go away.

 

The deep and ethereal edge of this post (since I feel obligated to provide one) would be about fears of the unknown we all face at times and the powerlessness those feelings spawn. Yet, in the end we can vanquish most of the darkness around us simply by turning on a light, so to speak, and taking action: telling someone NO, walking away instead of going the h**l off, or making a long overdue phone call. We don't always get the answers we want, but many times we can get words that make us stop standing around biting our nails and move forward instead.

 

My scare has passed, but not without granting me a much sharper appreciation for the words I watch coming out of my keyboard every day. The incident has made an indelible impression on my psyche. So, if you ever encounter a character in one of my stories who’s plagued by insect hairs or has issues with his/her vision, well, you’ll know what sparked the idea.

Peace.

Stefanie
www.stefanieworth.com

Liner notes: I like music in a variety of forms – old, new, hard, soft, edgy, classic – you get it. So, this  blog’s title is borrowed from the 1970s song (of the same title) by Jackson Browne. So much of that decade’s music was socially-conscious and world-scrutinizing. When you’re young, you can’t even pronounce half the lyrics you hear. Then you grow up and understand the sentiment. Too bad there weren’t music videos back then. Or maybe it’s best to leave pictures to these words up to the imagination.

New web site!

Can you do me a favor and take a peek at my revamped web site? www.stefanieworth.com

While anything involving the internet competes for the Biggest Time Suck trophy in this writer’s world, sometimes it’s a necessary evil. I can say that after getting two hours of sleep last night. I’m guesstimating I spent upwards of 20 hands-on hours over the weekend migrating my site to its new home at Weebly. This sister is tired, but satisfied.

I updated the look and feel last year, working with Norweigan graphic designer, Ida Jansson of Amygdala Design. For those who’ll ask why I didn’t use a local – or at least U.S. – designer, I’ll say it’s simply because after an exhaustive search of book covers and web sites, she had the design that spoke to me. And in this global technology world, I never would have known she wasn’t sitting right beside me through the whole process. It was that seamless.

So, I had the look, but over time, my site’s functionality has suffered under my personal know-how. I used to build web sites way back in the mid-90s when the World Wide Web was gaining marketing momentum. Those skills carried me during a time when most authors weren’t even thinking about having a site and gave me a promotional head start.

I’ve been able to depend on my own resources all these years, so the fact that Yahoo Sitebuilder was still using very old Java didn't bother me. Much. I’ll pay for design, but not site maintenance, since I could do it myself. (#frugalista) But like everything else, pricing and convenience have received a makeover thanks to technology. My original web site design cost me $300 in 2008 – and took weeks and weeks to complete. It was fun, but far less versatile than what I got for $125 last year – in about one week.

It’s now ditto for site creation itself. Though I’m still willing to spend an entire weekend moving a site, it only took a weekend. I've done overhauls that took me the better part of two weeks to complete with code and all. But this move was entirely WYSIWYG, I didn’t have to code a single item. My functionality has been boosted 300% and I’m paying a few bucks less than I’ve paid for the past five or six years.

I also changed my e-newsletter provider from Constant Contact to MailChimp. I was paying about $40 a month for my list of 500+ contacts. MailChimp is free for your first 2000 contacts. I know, right? I haven’t sent out any messages yet, but a newsletter’s coming.

Stop by www.stefanieworth.com if you get a chance. Leave me a note. Sign up for my newsletter. Buy a book. You know, all that stuff that convinces writers we’re not really crazy for making up stories and talking to imaginary people all day. I appreciate the reality check.

 

Meanwhile, I'm getting some sleep tonight.

 

Peace,

Stefanie

Happy tears and mounting edits

Hard for me to believe that I haven’t blogged since January.  But if you know me – or follow my musings – you know my life is a festival of happenings. There’s always something going on around here that competes with or supplants my writing time. (Not my desire – just the hours I have to execute.) Just as importantly though, I don’t consider these real-world intrusions as negatives. Take February through August, for example. In those months, we completed another senior year of high school and summer of college prep in my house. Whew! Two down. One to go.

Now that the chaos has calmed, I have to say that I miss my middle child. Desperately. Not that I didn’t miss my oldest just as much when he went off to college. In fact, I cried every day after he left – each time I passed his high school on my way to work…or the grocery store…or the movie theater…. You get the idea.

This time, with this son, I miss him in a way that’s nearly palpable. I get teary whenever I hear Big Sean sing "I hope you learn to make it on your own. If you love yourself just know you'll never be alone... And when you get it all just remember one thing - that one man could change the world." Those lyrics ring so true. I had to pull off the road one day and cry. Really. But like I told my youngest, my happiness for her brother outweighs the sadness.  So his going away isn’t any less difficult, just different. In the way that each child is different.

That said, sending my son off to frolic with the higher learning crowd has added a little more than 100 minutes of non-pickup/drop-off time to my daily schedule. (You don’t think about that while it's going on or else you'd talk yourself out of taking on the task. Or go crazy.) For years I've wished for extra hours in my day and – BAM! – like magic, I got ‘em. To top that off, my youngest is back in school and has freed me from her vampirish stay-up-all-night summer schedule.

 

So voile! I’m back to editing like the author I am. Here’s my magic to-date:

 

Gaging by numbers alone, my progress count would deceive me into thinking that I’m almost halfway through revisions. HA! I’ve actually added 8,424 words to the story. (Mind you, I cut 4,500+ words by deleting a chapter early on.) This means my actual word count – if I submitted the story “as is” today – would be 97,170. Oh my.

All that math made my head hurt. LOL Thus, the moral of this blog post is that it’s time to get back to the book. While my son's out learning how to change the world, my goal is to finish editing before autumn passes me by. 

#thatisall #amediting

www.stefanieworth.com
www.facebook.com/stefanieworthbooks

The World I Live In

Companies have focus groups. I have my children. We are huge lovers of all things fantasy, sci fi and supernatural, and wage serious word wars about the merits of earth-bending over X-Ray vision and things of that sort. For a while now, we’ve had an ongoing discussion – serious discussion – around the merits of a panic room in the basement that we can access in the event of the zombie apocalypse. The only thing we agree on so far is that having such a room would give us a huge advantage in our escape – but only so long as the zombies aren’t smart like the ones in I Am Legend. (((shudder)))

Shhh! Our potential panic room. Please
don't tell the zombies where we're hiding.

Tonight I asked a question I probably shouldn’t have about the tentative powers of the heroine in my current work-in-progress. Oh, the debate that ensued! My daughter re-wrote my story's entire Black Moment – and my son shot her whole notion down citing an example from some anime he watches. I let them finish before thanking them for the tangent and deciding my direction is a good one.

I love our spirited conversations about things that don’t exist. I cherish their unbridled willingness to not just think outside the box, but concede that there is no box at all. We need the escape. Heck – I need the escape. There is so much sad, bad, heart-wrenching news outside the walls of our happy home that I approach my Facebook newsfeed with a healthy dose of trepidation these days. They know that life is hard and unfair and some kids live with unspeakable horrors. We are lucky, we know. The dangers we conjure live only in our minds and on my pages. No one is harmed in the making of our “what if’s.”

So this is the world I live in. The crazy, every day realm I share with children who will one day blame their warped perception of possibilities on their overly imaginative mother. I figure they’ll either forgive me or wind up on Dr. Phil’s show. My money is on fond memories and grandchildren who appreciate a Nana who believes in fairies.

Stefanie

www.stefanieworth.com
www.facebook.com/stefanieworthbooks
Twitter & IG: @stefanieworth

Muse Moments: Lifting my kids' playlists

Have I ever mentioned that we listen to a little bit of (almost) every kind of music in my house? Well, we do. And over the past couple of years I have to admit that I've built my 99% of my writing playlist from my kids' song discoveries. I'd never heard of the alternative groups they adore, but now not only do I know their lyrics, I've collected their tunes on my computer. When I'm ready to write I hit play, shuffle, and get carted off into my characters' worlds.

So last week, my daughter plays a song that's new to me by Hozier and I have been absolutely fascinated with it ever since. So much so that I've concocted my own background story for the lyrics and allowed it to serve as my anti-villain's theme for the angst I'm putting him through. He's in a pretty bad spot - the Black Moment - so one song can't carry the whole ordeal. I added in Muse and Incubus and the guy is now out of his mind.

It's been a long week at work. Forgive me, the writer, who's taking it out on the people in her pages. Imagination has its perks. Let's see what you think:

Here's Hozier singing "Like Real People Do." The opening verse says:
"I had a thought, dear
However scary
About that night
The bugs and the dirt
Why were you digging?
What did you bury
Before those hands pulled me
From the earth?"

 

There's also "Starlight" by Muse. The lyrics that move my keyboard are pretty simple:

"Our hopes and expectations
Black holes and revelations"

But it's mostly the way he sings "I just wanted to hold you in my arms."

 

 

And then lastly (for tonight) I've been stuck on "Love Hurts" by Incubus for over a month now. He sings:

"Love hurts...
But sometimes it's a good hurt
And it feels like I'm alive.
Love sings,
When it transcends the bad things.
Have a heart and try me,
'cause without love I won't survive."

 

Now back to the tormented lover in my book who's about to lose it all. Without love, he won't survive either. Fade to black.

'Til next time, find more me at www.stefanieworth.com and www.facebook.com/stefanieworthbooks.

Raking words

Leaves have invaded my yard. The heat kicks in without manually prompting the thermostat. I tossed my grandmother’s quilt across my bed. Fall has arrived. 

And it just occurred to me that I am SO ready for a change in season. 

 

I can’t say I’ve been in a rut that only autumn can cure. Or that I need a blast of winter to blow all the crap out of my life. No, I’m welcoming the change the way you welcome clean lenses on a pair of dirty sunglasses or open curtains after a dark night. Fresh perspectives are good. 

 

So the WIP (ridiculously close to finished for too many weeks now) also got a fresh look last week as I spent several nights re-reading it from page 150 forward. That was about 150 pages of me trying to act like a reader, not writer or editor, immersing myself in a stranger’s story. 

 

For the record, it didn’t work. But what I accomplished was perspective. Yes, the characters are on the right track. The upcoming moments – some heart wrenching, some triumphant – will ring true. And like summer fading into autumn, I will have to let this story go in order to move on to my imagination’s next season. 

 

Picture me gathering words onto pages like leaves raked into a pile. That’s me today. #changingseasons #amwriting

 

www.stefanieworth.com

Blog in the Round

I was very excited to be invited to participate in Blog in the Round - 4 Questions and Pass It On by Montlake Romance author Liane Spicer. She and I have traveled some of the same ups and downs in our writing journey and she’s been a wonderful colleague and faraway friend in my writing world. I’m honored that she thought of me. Liane was asked to participate by the fabulous Marissa Monteilh. Blog in the Round is a great way for readers, and other authors, to get to know us better, and it demonstrates the amazing author camaraderie and support that we have for each other.

So, here goes:

What am I working on/writing?

I am about 25,000 words from the end of my latest fantasy romance that features a pretty awful villainess. I have to say that she’s a blast to write. There’s something about her having no sense of remorse that allows the words to flow. She’s easy to define, which makes the heroine – her opposite – easy to define and write as well. When I finish this WIP, I plan to take a break and write a novella or two before diving into the WIP’s sequel.

How is my writing/work different from others in its genre?

When I published Where Souls Collide seven years ago, African American authors who wrote paranormal, fantasy and sci-fi, seemed hard to find. Over the years, I’ve found that’s not really the case. We’re out there, but more importantly (to me), I don’t want my work to be defined by color.

My characters are diverse and their everyday problems – from finding love, to unemployment, to the threat of divorce – are universal. I always work around a theme of second chances because I believe every person and every character deserves another chance to get it right. I just happen to find that so much easier to ensure with a little supernatural intervention.

Why do I write what I do?

My kids have heard the story of how I loved Mio My Son (by Astrid Lindgren) over and over and over. I read it in the fourth grade and I still remember how devastated I was by the idea of eating subtraction soup: the more you ate, the hungrier you got! Who would think of something like that? I guess it got my mind going because I gravitated to stories depicting fantasy worlds. Eventually my fascination spread to my TV viewing because Outer Limits, Twilight Zone and the Night Stalker became my favorite shows. Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Toni Morrison and, later, Anne Rice became my favorite authors.

Not to mention that my mother was an AVID romance reader! I’d go behind her and read as many of her paperbacks as I could. I practically inhaled those books as a teen. It would be many years later before I merged my two reading loves – romance and the supernatural, but once it happened I haven’t really thought of writing anything else.

How does my writing process work?

I sit down and I start writing. Not true. I sit at the computer and usually waste a good 20 or 30 minutes online. I do. But I keep a writing journal and at the start of each month I list 4-5 writing-related goals for the month. They include a target word count, a social network action, something related to industry memberships or craft workshops, and web site tweaks. It’s the word count that gets me offline and on to writing.

When I look at the clock and see how much sleep I can get after two hours of writing (I do have a day job), I pull up my iTunes and start my WIP’s playlist. Music is an integral part of writing for me. My current playlist includes movie soundtrack music (from Inception, Looper and Thor, for example), along with alternative songs from groups like Muse, rock from Evanescence, and pop from Bruno Mars. It’s eclectic but the overall list works together to set a desired mood while specific songs help direct the characters’ actions. 

I write until I either fall asleep, surpass the word goal or the characters stop talking for the night. Then, I log my word count and words written for the day in my journal, make a few notes for the next day and shut off the computer. (But there are always sticky notes nearby because the mind never stops!)

Thanks for dropping in. You can always visit me here or on Facebook or Twitter as well. And be sure to stop by Liane’s page, too.

‘Til next time, happy reading!
Stefanie
www.stefanieworth.com

Won't let go at any price

Today is the last day of the 2014 Romance Writers of America conference. Several of my romance-writing colleagues are in San Antonio, Texas, attending workshops, signings, parties and otherwise professionally commiserating. Wish I was there.

Kind of.

I've been thinking about re-joining RWA for the past couple of years. While my book was in limbo I didn't see the sense of it. I have my local critique group to keep me moving forward on my WIP and I didn't want to invest in a membership I didn't feel qualified to utilize. But how can I move my writing career forward if I'm not on top of industry changes and connected to the writers who are making a go at romance? It was one of those catch 22 situations for me.

You see, RWA's express purpose is "to advance the professional interests of career-focused romance writers through networking and advocacy. RWA works to support the efforts of its members to earn a living, to make a full-time career out of writing romance—or a part-time one that generously supplements his/her main income."

So, in a perfect storm of events -- a week that I wrote 12 pages pulling all-nighters after the day job, turning a significant plot corner in my story, and watching the RWA conference posts start to flow through my online feeds -- I traipsed over to the RWA, filled out the doggone form and just joined.

Sheesh, Stefanie.

I can't tell you how good it feels though. So, re-joining the Fantasy, Futuristic and Paranormal (FF&P) chapter was the next stop along with the Greater Detroit Romance Writers of America (GDRWA). I am really excited -- ecstatic -- about taking these next steps to move my journey forward.

Next year's RWA conference is in New York from July 22-25. I'm already planning to take the time off from work. I might drive. I might fly. But I do want to be there.

In between, my WIP will be finished and published and I'll be on book two of what I plan to make a series. Gotta set goals. Gotta go for them. Otherwise, what's the purpose of having a dream?

As I started writing this post, "If You Leave" by The Cure was blaring from the radio. The lyrics, "...touch you once, I touch you twice, I won't let go at any price," seemed meant just for me today. Re-committing to my writing career is both easier and harder because I've touched it once or twice: I've been published. I know what it takes and I know how that feels. I'm back in and I won't let go at any price.

"I always knew we'd meet again...someday."

Keep believing!
Stefanie
www.stefanieworth.com
#amwriting

Being Back

In the weeks since my last post, my brother was diagnosed with cancer and I stopped writing. Some people can charge through life's curves by setting their keyboards afire. Not me. I admit. This kind of thing brings me to a screeching halt.

In the early weeks I actually felt guilty about even wanting to put my God-given talents to use on fiction. Surely I had better things to do with my time and talent. I guilted myself into a few fits and starts; days when I'd say, "Your WIP is calling..." or "Your characters miss you..." or "You're not waiting on some magical checkered flag to rev your engine are you?..." But really, my family and I needed each other desperately for those first 21 days or so.

Then I began to see glimmers of a new normal: I slept through the night and actually felt rested the next morning. I went a whole day without bursting into tears. (Though my heart still trembles out of nowhere several times a day...) My brother met a fellow cancer warrior who lifted his spirits and quieted ours. And then I knew that I could return to my back-burnered pages.

Can I admit that I had no idea where I was in my story when I went back? It's like leaving any book midway through and picking it up after a month. I had to backtrack, refresh, re-introduce myself to the people in those pages. Once I'd forgiven myself for attending to my life, the words began to flow.

This book itself has had more than its share of ups and downs. Originally slated for publication in 2011 (then re-scheduled a time or two), I wrote the bulk of the first draft while I was going through my divorce. I should have brought the manuscript to a screeching halt while I gathered my wits, but I didn't. I forged ahead.

When the edits came from my wonderful editor Monica Harris (God rest her soul), Dorchester went into bankruptcy and the rights to my unpublished book went into limbo. It would be two years before the company and my contract found a new home when Amazon bought my former publisher and I became a Montlake Romance author.

During that time, I reluctantly started another book. Monica passed away, my oldest son went off to grad school, I settled into singledom, and realized my original story now belonged to an author with a new mindset. My beautiful cover deserves to sandwich some pages. So late in 2013, I started that story -- The Wicked and the Wonderful -- again, in earnest. And then the cancer curve came.

Yesterday, I re-read the scene I left off on six weeks ago. After some editing (which I usually don't do while I'm writing), I even scribbled the first few paragraphs of the next scene on the back of a marked-up page. And today, I'm writing this post.

I feel okay. I'm doing okay.

I won't bother typing in yesterday's changes. I'll put those pages into the draft binder with the rest of the manuscript's pages and move on to the next square in my plot chart. I'm looking forward to the villain and the heroine meeting up ahead. I hear their words and I have found my smile.

Being back is good.

Love your heart

You may or may not know that February is American Heart Month. You also might not know that heart disease is the #1 killer of Americans. It is also the #1 killer of women -- killing more women than all forms of cancer combined.

As writers, we spend an awful lot of time with "butts in chair, fingers on keyboard" -- as we should to meet word count goals and publishing deadlines. But you should also love your heart enough to get up 2-3 times an hour and walk around. Go get a glass of water (and drink it!). March in place for 60 seconds. Run up and down the stairs a couple of times.

Study after study continues to show that too much sitting has a negative effect on your health. I totally understand the importance of finishing that next scene. I've also seen the devastation of heart disease up close. And to know that 80 percent of all heart disease is preventable gives me all the more reason to get you off your butt today.

This red-lipped kissy face is for you and the 1100 women we lose to heart disease every day. Every day.

Love yourself. Love your heart.

I Go Red for my grandmother, my grandfather and myself. Who do you fight heart disease for?

Send me wishes

You've probably seen that meme floating around the internet about how being a writer is like having hundreds (or thousands!) of tabs open in your browser. A little too accurate for me today, summed up like so:

Send Me Wishes

Must. Write. Now.
'Cause scribbles in my head don't count.

But I'm distracted by

the waiting stairclimber,
impending snow,
sleepless children,
fictional kisses,
sad news,
the dishwasher's humming,
a Diet Coke crave,
open windows in my brain

that let everything in.

Woosaa...
(repeat)

Okay.
#amwriting

Well,
trying.

So about those wishes...
Must. Write. Now.

Stefanie
2.4.14
www.stefanieworth.com

Tonight's Writing Game

I have tee'd up the chapters in my WIP like dominoes: One good thump, just the right phrase and they will tumble through this well-plotted outline dot by dot, square by square, creating some fantastical shape that leaves you splayed and breathless at THE END. #thatisall #amwriting

Landslide

Today is one of those days when the thought, "I wish I could make more time to write," is quickly countered with, "But I don't wish I had less time with my kids." Writer's guilt I can conquer. Mommy guilt -- not so much.

Yet another life change occurred in my parental world today as my youngest child (known as Baby Girl and Little Bit to my Facebook friends) finished elementary school. It's a much bigger deal than my heart originally bargained for.

All day I've been singing Fleetwood Mac's song "Landslide." Especially the line that says, "I've been afraid of changing 'cause I built my world around you... Time makes you bolder, children get older and I'm getting older, too..." And it asks the question, "Can I handle the seasons of my life?"

Well, can I?

I mean goodness, I've done this twice already. It should be old hat. But the third time's charm struck after we arrived back home and I sat down at my laptop somewhat paralyzed. With a span of 13 years between my oldest and youngest, I've had plenty of years to prep for each of my "last baby does X" moments. Yet they always catch me off guard.

When she was a baby and I was juggling middle school football, T-ball, a crazy a** job and breastfeeding, I wanted everything to go faster. I couldn't wait until everybody could do just a little more for themselves so that I could find a minute or two to breathe. In those early years of hers, she absolutely caught the brunt of my "hurry up and grow up" mental chant.

Then suddenly (not at all though), she grew, she laughed, she turned into a tweenage Mini-Me and I felt buckets of hourglass sand slipping through my fingers. She did hurry up and grow up. But not by my doing, that's just life. When my oldest took off for grad school I instinctively turned around to slow her down, but it was too late.

Thankfully, only theoretically.

She's growing up, yes. And I'm accepting that I am in a state of lifelong transition because change never ceases.

I know that one day (too soon) ample writing time will come. I'll be able to post about my knocking off word counts and counting up sales because -- God willing -- there will be long languid hours without soccer practice, sleepovers and the mountain of busyness that life with kids brings.

But meanwhile, I will be deliberately thankful for every single moment: to be able to have a child, and raise her, and love her, and to have enough sense to stop and smell the roses that we plant together.

No, the landslide won't bring me down. Today.

Stefanie Worth
www.stefanieworth.com

Is it the how or the what?

I was looking at an Interview article about the new fall TV lineup and got totally sidetracked by Terrence Howard, who's bringing star quality to the new Law & Order: Los Angeles. Then I click on an in-story promo in the next column to gaze at Blair Underwood for a minute or two. Seems he's one of the stars in The Event, premiering on NBC this fall.

Oddly enough, the thought that came to mind as I read the two features was not how fine those two male specimens are (okay, maybe for a second), but the concept of versatility.

Have we not seen Terrence and Blair in all types of movies? They've acted in romances, thrillers, fantasy, on TV and on the big screen. What takes them there, I wonder? Is it the mode of transmission or the story they're telling? (Though I have no doubt it's simply been a matter of needing a paycheck on some occasions.) Hollywood has proven that it's not for everyone. Look at Kiefer Sutherland, son of movie-great Donald, who has fared far better on weekly television. Don't you think?

So, as I acknowledge that big isn't for everybody (though it can lead you to the same fulfilling outcome), I turn this idea inward and wonder about my own writing quest. Is publication about the mode of transmission or the story I'm telling?