Sonja Foust, Romance Author

Click on the image for the official info. Here’s the scoop:

The Chapel Hill Community Chorus (of which I am a member) will perform our winter concert on Friday and Saturday, December 16 and 17 at 7:30 PM (identical program both nights, you can choose which one fits your social calendar) at Hill Hall, UNC-Chapel Hill. The first half will be Cantatas 3 and 4 of J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, with full orchestra and excellent soloists. (The counter-tenor is amazing!) The second half will be Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, with the wonderful Frank Pittman as piano soloist, and a carol medley arrangement by Gwyneth Walker, and two audience sing-along carols. I am selling tickets ($12 for adults, $6 for students), so if you’re interested, let me know. Thanks!

I’m afraid I have to cheat you out of your pictures from the Likness family Thanksgiving. None of us were in a very picture-taking festive mood. Our little baby dog (who was getting to be an old lady in dog years) had heart failure and we had to put her to sleep. All of us were at the house for Thanksgiving dinner, so we got to see her one last time.

We got her when we moved into the very first house we ever owned on Lolita Street in Redlands, California. All four of us kids had begged and begged for a dog and, true to their word, as soon as we no longer rented a house, my parents got us a dog. Joanna and I were 12, Joel was 10, and Aaron was 8. We adopted her from a pet rescue program. When we went to visit her in her “foster home” for the first time, we all fell in love instantly. Joel named her Ramona, after Ramona Quimby of Beverly Cleary fame.

We all loved her so much. I remember taking her to the park and thinking about how often I’d looked at kids with dogs and wished so hard it hurt that I could have a dog too, and now I had one. I felt like the luckiest kid on the entire planet.

She made the move with us to North Carolina. She was a constant in a rough time for me. It’s never easy on a kid to move to an entirely new place, but it sure is easier with a happy dog to meet you when you get home. The move wasn’t all that easy on her either. Before we fenced the back yard, we kept her in a dog run in the back yard when we went to church. That didn’t last long. She chewed through the chicken wire and escaped, and then had to go to the emergency vet to have an x-ray of the piece of wire she’d swallowed.

She was always Mom’s dog, her shadow. And when the four of us kids moved out, one by one, she became even more Mom’s dog. Even with the addition of her new doggy sister, Sally, Ramona was always the Princess, or rather, the Queen. It didn’t take Sally long to figure out the pecking order.

In her later years, she was getting arthritic. She had poor circulation to her legs and a deteriorating spine. She’d been on heart medicine for a few months, with a progressively worsening heart murmur. When we adopted her, we think she was about 6 months old. That would have made her about 13 years old when she died today. That’s about 65 in human years. It was her time to go, but it’s so hard to say goodbye to a dog that’s as much a part of your family as anyone else is. Her human brothers and sisters and mommy and daddy will miss her very much.

Rest in peace, Mona-dog.

Well, it’s November 26, my wordcount is 17,150, and I’ve finally admitted that I am not going to make it to 50,000 this month.

However, there is a possibility that I might finish the book (perhaps even by year’s end) if it’s not a steaming pile of doody like I suspect it might be.

You are all, supposedly, my friends, so I’m sure you wouldn’t tell me if it was a steaming pile of doody anyway, but since some of you asked to see it, I’ve come up with a posting solution. I’m going to post it on my old Xanga, a little bit at a time, in the protected area. This means that (1) you have to have a Xanga account to read it, (2) I have to give you Protected access, and (3) you have to be logged in when you are looking at my site in order to see it. I will add those who have already expressed interest and make the first post today. I’ll probably do five or six pages a day. Small chunks.

Happy extended Thanksgiving everyone! My meal #2 is this afternoon, but first I’m going to the gym to burn some pre-meal calories. Pictures later, I’m sure (of the dinner, not of me pre-burning calories– no one wants to see that).

So National Novel Writing Month? Is not going well. My big amazing goal this weekend was to write 12,000 words and get myself up to 24,000 by today, then write 6,000 more before Tuesday so that I would be up to the 30,000 mark by the beginning of week four.

Over the weekend, I wrote 1,777 words. I know, I suck. My grand total is nearing 14,000 and I have very few writing days left to get to the 50,000 mark. I need to make it. I cannot fail at this. I did it last year and I must do it again.

I’m debating how I will motivate myself though. By this time last year, my outline was done and I knew what the big culminating scene would be. That was motivation enough to finish. This year, I have no outline. In fact, I have no idea what’s going to happen in the next scene. In fact, I don’t even really HAVE scenes. I’m just writing.

So, I’m issuing a call for help. Ways you can help:

1. Leave me comments on my blog or somewhere on the NaNoWriMo site (my profile) “encouraging” me to get in gear, or just outright yelling at me to move my butt.
2. Give me ideas. Do you have a great story from your past that you’d like to see in print? Do you have little plot bunnies floating around in your head that you could contribute? Specifically, I’m looking for a motivation for one of my main characters to have left her home on the west coast and taken a few years to travel to the east coast.
3. Tell me your wordcount. I really need the competition. (By the same token, if your wordcount is lower than mine, just keep it to yourself. Heehee.)

Ok, onward to the NaNoWriMo winners’ circle!

EDIT: Special thanks to kennethlove for giving me a better title. The next great American novel is now entitled Free Time. Thanks ken!

ANOTHER EDIT: Are any of you interested in reading the blasted thing? I’d be willing to post it somewhere super secret and give you the password if you want to see it.

Because I have nothing good to say, I give you (drumroll please) eye candy.

Yay, we love you, H. Jack!

And because I am an equal-opportunity eye-candy provider, this one is for Robbie:

Wee, now we’re all happy. See ya Monday.