Anya Bast

I grew up in Minnesota and moved to Kentucky when I was 18. I’ve been in Kentucky now for, well, more years than I would like to say. ;) The accents in these two places are pretty different. When I moved down here I had a hella Minnesotan accent. Now I have a bit of a Kentucky drawl to my words. But mostly I fall somewhere in between the two accents, saying some words (like ‘bag,’ for example) Minnesotan-style and other words (like ‘hi’ and ‘bye’) Kentuckian. If I’m talking to a Minnesotan, my accent will become more like theirs. If I’m talking to a countryish Kentuckian (the accents around and in Louisville aren’t that thick), I speak more like them.

I’m a little bit of an accent chameleon, I guess.

But sometimes I run into people here that show me that I’ve never truly grown a good ear for the Kentucky accent. Here’s a little case in point.

Last night on my way home from the day job, I stopped at a small country store to buy some pet food. I live in horse country and this was a horse/farm type of place. They were moving stuff around or moving in or out, or I don’t know what. In any case, the store was in disarray. I asked the man where the specific cat food I wanted was and he says (much to my surprise)….

“It’s over there sitting on that slab of semen.” He jerks his head toward a pile of horse blankets and other things and goes back to his box.

I stand, head cocked to the side, blinking. Semen? There’s semen here? Wait…there’s a whole SLAB of SEMEN??!!

“Uhm?” I start to say, eyebrows raising. “Where’s the s–s–slab?”

He turned to me and points at the pile of horse blankets again. “Over there.”

I walked around and find a slab of CEMENT upon which rest the cans of cat food I seek.

Oh.

Cement, not semen. I am relieved. The guy had pronounced cement like SEE-meant, only he’d dropped the ‘t’ or I hadn’t heard it because he’d already been turning back around to his box.

I say sa-MEANT, he says SEE-ment.

Yeah.

We came back from Belgium, but then I got sick. Yuck. Strep throat. There are a few tendrils of euw still clinging to me, but mostly the sickness is gone. My daughter got sick too (but with just a cold, luckily).

Belgium was great. We spent the holidays with my husband’s family. Every time I go to Europe I’m struck by how different the culture really is. One thing in particular I was struck by on this trip was how the grocery stores in Belgium have gone “no bag”. You either have to bring your own bags, or you have to buy their bags to sack your stuff. I thought it was cool as hell. I’ve tried to use my own sacks many times, but I always revert to forgetfulness and laziness at some point. If store provided bags weren’t an option AT ALL, I would be forced into the behavior.

Since I don’t foresee that happening in the U.S. for a long time, I’m going to start to try and bring my own bags again. We’ll see how long I can keep it up. It’s one of those things I always mean to do, yet never quite am able to succeed at. Like giving up coffee in the morning in favor of tea. Or walking on the treadmill more. Or eating more broccoli. Uhm, well, anyway. But I really am going to try once more to bring my own bags.

Also, in some some grocery stores in Belgium, they also have this coolio electronic scanner thing. You scan each item as it goes into the cart and then just hand the device to the cashier at the counter. No offloading of all the groceries onto the moving carpet thingie. There’s some sort of safe guard, though, to protect against stealing. If the safe guard is tripped, you have to offload. I have since discovered they have this in the U.S. too, but I haven’t seen it anywhere yet.

Only a couple more months until Witch Blood releases!! EIYEEE!

Now I’m off to get some writing done.

I’m running a blogwarming contest over on Maverick Authors until the first of the year. You can win books from Lauren Dane, Megan Hart and me. Go on over to the entry titled Blogwarming Contest and enter! It’s super easy. All you have to do is talk about books.

It’s early on Friday morning and I’m up having some coffee and worrying about my husband driving on icy country roads. My daughter’s occupational therapist will arrive in a couple hours and I need to clean my house! It’s a mess. See, right now, I have Book Brain. Like I wrote about in a previous blog post, it’s when the novel takes over and I can’t really think straight anymore. Cleaning? Bwahaha! Ain’t happening when I have Book Brain.

What’s good about having Book Brain right now is that I’m entering the middle section of Witch Heart. The middle is always the hardest part of the book for me to write. I have my strategies to get through it, and I usually revise the hell out of it before I write the end. But, still, the Dreaded Middle. Ugh. However, the pacing of this book is so that entering the middle isn’t that bad. So Book Brain right now is a very good thing. Hopefully it will carry me over the hump of the middle and start me down the slope toward the conclusion.

Last night I wrote about 2k on Witch Heart. That’s actually pretty good for me in one sitting. I also wrote 2k on a sooper seekrit story I don’t want to say anything about. So, 4k for the whole day. Not bad.

This morning I’m itching to get started on Witch Heart again. I have all kinds of things to write and I can’t wait. But, life, you know. She gets in the way.

My husband actually salivates when he asks me to make this every year. I can’t take credit. It’s straight from a recipe I found a long time ago. With so much butter, it’s got to be good.

3 cups mashed yams
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs, beaten
3/4 cup melted butter, divided
1/4 cup evaporated milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/4 cup chopped nuts

Combine yams, sugar, eggs, 1/4 cup butter, milk and vanilla; beat well. Spread mixture in casserole. Combine 1/2 cup butter, flour, brown sugar and nuts; sprinkle over sweet potato mixture. Bake at 350 for 35 to 40 minutes.

1. I KNOW there were two socks when I put them in the washer and now there is only one. Where, oh, WHERE did the other one go?
2. How is it some people can get so wrapped up in TV show fandoms that they sound like they think it’s all real. Also, isn’t there more important things to get so worked up over?
3. Homophobia. Gah! Such a frustrating mystery to me.
4. How it is that Cute Overload has reached in and possessed a chunk of my soul.
5. How they could have thought it was a good idea to cancel Dead Like Me or Firefly.
6. Star fruit is always on sale in the produce section, but who actually buys and eats it?
7. Pork rinds. Can we just not?
8. How I can alternate between Zen Buddhist calm and all out anxiety with no middle ground.
9. How in the middle of the night I manage to step on that one block I managed to miss during toy clean up.
10. How some weeks I have tons of things to blog about and other weeks…nada.

What are some of your personal mysteries?

A scintillating day in the life of a romance author. There are thrills! There are chills! There are….yeah, okay, there’s none of that. There is some caked on food I had to scrape off a onesie and barely averted coffee spill onto on my laptop keyboard.

A photo journal of my day.

5am. Insomina. Get up and write, check email, write blogs until Chiclet wakes:

Mmmmm…coffeeee….

Feed dog. (oh….and here’s where it gets really exciting. Hold on guys!)

Chiclet wakes. We both have breakfast (mine is different from hers)

We get ready and hit the road to run errands:

Ipods are just the most awesome thing in the world. Ipods docks for your car stereo are EVEN BETTER. I have a music-loving Chiclet. She especially likes The Decemberists. Luckily, so do I. (Damn…I need to clean my car interior)

Shopping at our friendly neighborhood Target.

They didn’t have what I needed.

Then it was off to toddler open gym for Chiclet, where we played for an hour and a half:

Then home again! A nap for Chiclet and….

Writing for me. Mmmmmm…diet cooooke with liiime…..

My computer is “well loved”. I use it a lot, after all.

After she wakes up, we have lunch and go through our normal afternoon routine of me stacking blocks, playing with toys with her, changing diaper, while getting snatches of writing time in between.

Yes, the glamorous life of a romance author. Y’all are lucky I didn’t have scrub toilets today. ;)

I woke up at 5am and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I got up to write and do some picky administrative things I’ve been putting off. (Writers have to do picky administrative things. Who knew?)

Going through my email, I found five pieces of email from readers stashed in various places. OY. I have a one touch policy with reader email. I open it and reply to it immediately. When it’s stashed in strange folders, it makes it hard for me to do that. Four bits were about Witch Fire (I’m totally amazed I ever get any at all).  Made me happy. Did not make me happy they were stuck in an unread folder. I replied immediately.

There was also an email about Ordinary Charm. Out of all my Ellora’s Cave books, that one gets the biggest response from readers. Maybe because it’s a witch book? Apparently I’m not bad at writing witches. Hmmm….maybe I should examine that one more closely. Heh. Maybe because the witch is overweight? Not many romance novels, erotic or otherwise with plus size characters.

In other news, I finally hit my stride on Witch Heart. I had to rewrite the beginning twenty gazillion times because getting the book off to the wrong start…? Not good. Finally Adam blew something up and everything fell into place. I set the book in Crocus Hill, St. Paul, Mn (That would be the Summit Avenue area, for those who know). Well, a big chunk of it will be there, anyway. I plan to do some damage. :) Demons run amok and such. Funnily enough, I know more about this area of St. Paul now than when I lived there. Via research and the Intarweb!

Today I am photo-documenting my day as a blogging experiment. If it doesn’t turn out too incredibly boring, I’ll post it soon.

My husband woke me up because I was crying in my sleep. Normally I wake myself up because I cry really, really hard in my sleep. It’s amazing how everything is more intense in dreamlandia than it is in waking reality. Emotion is sharper, sex can be more explosive. My theory? Uhm…not sure exactly, but it has something to do with the centers of the brain.

The dream, btw, was nothing personally traumatic or anything. It was just a dream with a heavy emotional component.

So we get up (quiet, not to wake the daughter), make coffee and we’re standing there in front of our living room window looking out over the frost-laced front yard and…a buffalo walks through our line of vision. A WHITE buffalo, an adolescent. He ambles down our little country street alongside the cow pasture in front of our house and off down the road.

Me: *head tilt* Uhm?
DH: “Did you just see that?”
Me: “I think so.”
DH: “I’ll go call the police.”

Turns out he’s an escapee from a nearby buffalo farm. Wasn’t sure there for a sec if I wasn’t still dreaming. *g*