At long last a LiveJournal by Jeri Smith-Ready

Yesterday I managed to tear my eyes away from the Sarah Palin Train Wreck long enough to write my newsletter and, um, read part of a book. OK, not the world's most productive day.

But over the weekend I finally finished Spencer's story, or at least a first draft. Still waiting for comments from my second beta reader. My first reader basically just said what she liked but had no ideas for improvement. Sigh...nice ego juice, but it doesn't help much.

It took me nearly a month to write this 5K-word story (not working all day every day, just from the time I started until I finished, including research and taking several days to work on other projects). Monroe's story was relatively easy, because he basically told it in Wicked Game. (Of course, he fudged some of the details.)

But Spencer is relatively enigmatic. The only clue I gave myself (and readers) in WG was his speech at the Smoking Pig debut party, where he talks about rock 'n' roll being about immortality, but more importantly about eternal youth--hence the parallel to vampires.

“Thank you all for coming out to hear our little show.” He holds the mike in one hand and shifts the stand in a gesture of false bashfulness. “Along with playing some tunes to get you moving, we’ve been asked to tell our stories tonight. Stories of how we became vampires.” The crowd emits scattered snickers, but Spencer’s face bears such an earnest look of wild innocence that most people just stare.

"Some of us wanted to live forever," he says. “Some of us just wanted to live.” His Adam’s apple bobs once, and his eyes go far away for a moment so brief I’d have missed it if I’d blinked.

“But for all of us,” he continues, “it was about the music. The music turned us as much as the blood.”

That's all I had to work with. That and the fact that he was from Memphis and died in 1959 (but not necessarily in Memphis).

But I'm very happy with it now. I love fleshing out the WVMP universe this way, from points-of-view other than Ciara's.  The things I discover while writing these stories will no doubt give me ideas for Bad to the Bone and beyond (if there is a beyond *fingers crossed*).  In Spencer's story, for example, we get to see and feel what happens during and after the Change. 

I hope y'all like it. Newsletter subscribers will get to see it by tomorrow, a week ahead of everyone else. (You can sign up for the newsletter on my home page.)

And since I cannot look away, I thought I'd link to this excellent post about why Sarah Palin's lack of experience is so scary. Fivethirtyeight.com is a fantastic site for political junkies who want something a little more solid than the average poll watch sites.  The analysis is staggeringly robust, and makes me fondly recall my days as a Statistics tutor.  (Yes, writers can do math!)


So what did you do this weekend?

Just off the top of your head, how many houses do you own?

I checked with my staff, and they tell me I have one.  And it needs a new septic system.