Losing a Day

by M.L. "Matt" Buchman
 
A friend, Judith, was teasing me about was I finally going to do an animal post, or something cool about the craft and process of writing. Um... Okay, I am a cat person. I was raised by dogs but I'm...

Okay, maybe that sentence needs a little explanation. When my sister was born, my parents had never seen a baby up close before. Dad said, "Well, I know how to raise dogs. I'll get one and whatever I do for the dog, you do for the kid." My sister was raised by the standard poodle. The family archives are filled with photos of her sleeping on the dog and the dog glaring at the camera with a look that clearly said, "You wake this child and you are toast!" When he died, we got another one. Instead of being a smart, savvy, admirable credit to his breed, Figaro was a happy, go-lucky idiot.

Figaro being impressed with how pretty he is.

Okay, let me prove that stupid part... (getting in deeper here). One morning we found him barking at his waterbowl. Well, he had reason to, there was a trapped fieldmouse swimming back and forth in it. We set the mouse outside and didn't think of it again until that afternoon. The mouse arrived at the metal screen door trying to get back into the farmhouse basement where the rest of its family probably still resided. Figaro spotted it, cornered it, and licked it on top of the head. The inch-long mouse jumped in terror, the dog bolted into the fields. We didn't see him for hours. The mouse returned to her task of looking for a hole to get back inside.

Not a smart dog. The fact that we went through puberty together probably explains a lot about me.

Okay, but this didn't set out to be an animal story, sorry Judith. This is a story about how I lost yesterday. I like to write my blog posts right before they're due, keeps them fresh and lively for me... It also makes them late on occasion, like today.

Now, while I normally lose a day to a good story, that's not what happened yesterday. That is what happened on Monday. I was focusing on my next novel when a friend made some remark or other, not even sure what. But suddenly I was sitting on a short story idea that I just had to write. I almost never write short stories, so when they come along, I grab onto them. My latest one was a science fiction tale called "Moon Shine" released in Fiction River's "Moonscapes" anthology.  A tale about a hard-drinking gal from Appalachia driving her rig between the planets. This story was her continuing adventures. So, I lost Monday.

Tuesday, I lost that day due to a website revision. I've spent much of the last 4 months researching website tools to fix a basic failure in mine. It looked lame, tired, and while it has a fair number of visitors due to the popularity of my "Night Stalkers" romances, it wasn't doing its job. Now my next traditional press release Pure Heat (May 6, 2014) was just selected by Publisher's Weekly as a Top 10 Romance of Spring 2014 right along with Suzanne Brockmann's Do or Die. (I'm not proud, I'm too busy being shocked and amazed.)

So, yesterday, I found the technology I'd been looking for all month and totally redid my site (http://www.mlbuchman.com). You can now see blurbs, read chapter excerpts, see what order the series are supposed to go in, and buy books. Yes, I finally got that put in. YAY! There's still more to do, like upcoming releases, but the guts of it are there.

That's how I lost yesterday when I was supposed to have this blog written. Now you may think that this is somehow my fault. You may think that it's Matt who has been telling this story. What I didn't mention at the top is that I'm actually Matt's muse, I just have a terrible time controlling him because he keeps going off on these ridiculous tangents like short stories and websites.

As I said before, sorry Judith, but this isn't a cat story. This is a story by a cat. My name is Androcles and quite how I pulled this M.L. "Matt" dude as someone I have to be a-muse for (is the active form of that a-musing?), I just don't know. So, anyway, I got him to do this blog, finally! Now, if I can just get him back on his novel. That boy is a trial, let me tell you. SIGH!

Me taking a breaking from a-musing: vacationing along the Metolius River. 
(The river just pops out of the hillside this big. Is that cool or what?)