My own fan art!

Yes, it's true -- I've drawn and colored my own piece of fan art. This will be entered in a "new superhero" contest, actually.... the benefits of winning would be fabulous, but I'm glad it made me get my pencils and pens out, and then I fired up Photoshop for the bubblicious pic.

(c) 2010 Cynthia L. Moyer. All Rights Reserved.

Merry Christmas to me!

Isn't that is a beautiful thing? I am already learning things I never knew, which is excellent.

Like, for example, I read getting your manuscript ready to submit should include a check for extra spaces, replace the ellipses with three real periods with no spaces, and your em dashes should be two hyphens with no spaces on either side (are you excited yet?).

The ellipses and em dashes I got...pretty--easy--to fix, right? The spaces, though, completely surprised me! Once I clicked on the "paragraph" button in the tool bar, I discovered my ms was riddled (YES, RIDDLED!) with extra spaces!! The previous formatting had stuck a space in FRONT of nearly every paragraph, as well as at the end!

So as I travel through each scene, replacing overused words (bubble, bubbles, emerald, and character names), I hit that paragraph button and delete the extra spaces, as well as check all of the other punctuation.

I am still battling Word because it likes to randomly stick in the straight quotes, even though I have told it to replace them with smart quotes -- somebody's cranky and needs a nap! (I'm looking at you, Word!)

The revising continues, but I have to turn my websites off now because it's too easy to dig into Kristen Lamb's blog and come up for air hours later.

For the next two days, in between taking care of all of the short people who call me Mom, I will be making a dirt bike cake for a young man turning 10. Fun times!
Peace and bubbles,
Cynthia