I’m work­ing on Ele­men­tal Assas­sin 5 right now, and I real­ized some­thing kind of cool about it the other day.

When I get done with this book, I will have writ­ten more than 500,000 words about Gin Blanco. Yep, that’s right — half a mil­lion words about one char­ac­ter. That’s a whole lot of words, not to men­tion all the typ­ing!

Of course, I’d love to write more books about Gin beyond these five, but that’s going to be up to the sales gods and read­ers. Still, I think half a mil­lion words is a pretty cool accom­plish­ment. I’m totally pat­ting myself on the back right now — and keep­ing my fin­gers crossed that the words and Gin’s sto­ries will keep on coming!

I got a nice e-mail this week. Glenn at the Tin­ley Park Pub­lic Library con­tacted me and asked me if they could use a quote by me about libraries on their Web site. It’s part of a reg­u­lar quotes fea­ture the library does.

Of course, I said yes. You can see the quote here (it’s on the right-hand side of the page). Or here’s what I said, which comes from my bio here on my Web site:

“Most folks think peni­cillin, indoor plumb­ing, and the Inter­net are the world’s best inven­tions. Not me. The great­est thing ever cre­ated was a library. Indoor plumb­ing is a close sec­ond, though.”

You know you’ve made it as an author when peo­ple start quot­ing you. Okay, not really, but I still think it’s cool.

Fin­ished Talk Me Down by Vic­to­ria Dahl. I’ve seen a lot of folks on the Web rav­ing about Dahl’s con­tem­po­rary romances so I decided to try one.

In this book, a creepy ex-boyfriend dri­ves erotic romance writer Molly Jen­nings back to her tiny home­town of Tum­ble Creek, Colo. No sooner is Molly back in town than she runs into Ben Law­son, her girl­hood crush who is now the oh-so-sexy chief of police. Molly is eager to see if Ben still lives up to his crush-worthy sta­tus, but Ben is a lit­tle hes­i­tant, as he doesn’t date local women since the town is so small and gos­sip gets spread around so fast. Then, there’s the small mat­ter that Ben has no idea what Molly does for a liv­ing, since she keeps her job a secret from every­one. But when some­one starts stalk­ing Molly, Ben is deter­mined to pro­tect her no mat­ter what …

I liked a lot of things about this book — the Col­orado set­ting, the sec­ondary char­ac­ters, and espe­cially Ben and Molly. It was nice to read a book where the woman is flirty and fun-loving, and the guy was more reserved and seri­ous. (To me, it often seems like the guy is usu­ally the care­free one in romance books). There was also a cool twist with Molly’s stalker at the end, which I won’t spoil here. Let’s just say that I thought I knew who the bad guy was, but Dahl threw a lit­tle some­thing dif­fer­ent into the plot that I didn’t expect.

But I had one big issue with the book — the fact that Molly keeps her career as an erotic romance writer a secret from every­one, includ­ing her par­ents. I just didn’t think that was believ­able at all. How could you keep some­thing like that a secret for years? Espe­cially from your fam­ily? And more impor­tantly, why would you want to?

Maybe it’s because I’m a writer, but I work hard on my books and I want folks to know that those are my words they’re read­ing. Even my most dis­tant fam­ily mem­bers know that I write books (if I haven’t told them, then some­one else has). Even if I was writ­ing erotic romance and using a pen name like Molly does in the book, I’d still tell my close fam­ily mem­bers what I was doing.

It’s not that Molly isn’t proud of what she does, but she used Ben as the inspi­ra­tion for one of her sto­ries at the begin­ning of her career and now won­ders how he and every­one else will react if they find out what she does for a liv­ing. Okay, I can kind of under­stand that, but I also thought it was pre­sented as more of a conflict/problem than it really was.

Over­all, though, this was a fun, breezy con­tem­po­rary romance, and I’m inter­ested in read­ing the read of the Tum­ble Creek books. So thumbs up.

Up next: Plea­sure of a Dark Prince by Kres­ley Cole.

Books in my TBR pile: About 20.

So I thought I would talk a lit­tle bit about some of the emo­tions that authors go through (as the mood and time strikes me here on the blog). After all, we write about our char­ac­ters’ emo­tions in our books, surely we have some of our own to talk about, right?

The emo­tion of the day? Jealousy.

Yep, I’ll admit it — I get jeal­ous of other authors from time to time. I think any author who says that she never gets jeal­ous is prob­a­bly lying. Nobody is that nice all the time. Or maybe I’m just that cyn­i­cal.  

So what I’m a jeal­ous of? Lots of things. I won­der why this author got more pro­mo­tion than I did. Or why so-and-so hit the best-seller list when my books are just as good as hers. Why every­one on the Inter­net seems to love someone’s new book and not mine. Why I never feel like one of the in-crowd or cool kids when­ever I go to con­fer­ences. Some­times, when a book I read truly blows me away, I’m jeal­ous that it’s a story that I didn’t write. Why didn’t I have that bril­liant idea instead of her?

I imag­ine these are the same things that lots of other authors are jeal­ous of too. In case you haven’t noticed by now, us writ­ers are a pretty neu­rotic bunch.

But I think it’s what you do with your jeal­ousy that’s important. Me? I try to chan­nel it into some­thing pos­i­tive. I try to work harder and smarter, do more pro­mo­tion, and, of course, con­tin­u­ously work to improve my own writ­ing so that maybe I’ll be the one mak­ing the best-seller list and get­ting rave reviews the next time around.

I’ll admit that I’m not always suc­cess­ful. Whee­z­ley, my sig­nif­i­cant other, has lis­tened to me gripe and grum­ble about these sorts of things many times. He usu­ally just rolls his eyes and dis­tracts me with some choco­late. Sadly, it usu­ally works.

But at least I’m try­ing to slay the green-eyed mon­ster. In the end, I think that’s what mat­ters most. Well, that and the choco­late.

What about you guys? Does jeal­ousy ever rear its ugly head with you? How do you deal with it? Share in the comments.

Where has all the time gone? Because it’s already March. Seri­ously, the last two months have flown by. Gah!

And I bet that March is going to go by just as fast, since I’ve got a  month full of dead­lines loom­ing. I’ve got copy edits due for Venom, final page proofs for Web of Lies, and I need to do one more quick pol­ish on Ele­men­tal Assas­sin 5 before send­ing that in to my agent. Oh yeah, and come up with a title for it too. I also want to go back and do one more pol­ish on the urban fan­tasy young adult book that I’ve been work­ing on, and I need to revise Spy 2, which is part of a new urban fan­tasy series that I hope to sell.

And, in between all this, I have to sack up 500 pack­ets of book­marks for my next pro­mo­tional mail­ing and stuff about 140 envelopes that go out to bookstores/readers’ groups as part of another mailing.

I so need a clone, if only so she could stand in line at the post office for me.