No surprise, but hubs and I loved every pound kitty we've owned. They’re totally a mess, semi-defective, and that's what gives them...character.
 
In case you think dogs are better than cats, let me describe my two current “preciouses” and change your mind.
 
#1) They are automatic foot warmers. Even in summer. How fabulous...
 
#2) We do not have to let them out to use the bathroom in inclement weather. They’ve got their own box. Indoors. We do not have to walk them. They wouldn't go, if we tried.
 
#3) They stare at us adoringly for hours. Or maybe they’re plotting some sort of revenge.
 
#4) Excellent actors. The younger, ridiculously hairy cat had us totally fooled by the look-at-how-sweet-I-am act at the pound. Now that she has a roof over her head and blankets to shed upon? She’s the devil.

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#5) No need for alarm clocks. When 5:30 am rolls around, if hubs or I aren’t up, the cats think their world has stopped spinning and we are 1 human getting out of bed away from complete annihilation. Their mission: get us out of bed and feeding them kibbles to prevent the world from being destroyed.
 
#6) The older cat is literally dumber than two bricks put together. (He’s also cross-eyed, the vet couldn’t find his testicles, and he had some sort of congenital eyelid problem. We’re pretty sure he’d ride the short bus to school, if he were human.) He has but one brain cell, and it is set on “snuggle”.

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#7) They’re tough. These animals are so ornery, they will live forever.
 
#8) They have opinions but not opposable thumbs. While they might be thinking “flabby Mommy” when I step out of the shower, they cannot post or Tweet these thoughts.
 
#9) Bedtime and waking up time are the best times of their days. Other than sleeping time, grooming time, and snack time, that is.
 
#10) They’re fabulous hunters…in their own minds. I’m not sure what the dumb cat will do with the deer he’s posturing after through the window, but he believes he can totally take her.

So, it was my first year scoring RITA’s for the RWA yearly contest. On the RWA website, there’s not a lot of explanation as far as what a 1, 5, or 10 means. Is it bad to get a 6? I don’t know. Can you only give out one 10 because that means “best book in the universe”? I don’t know. Is it only people with an average above 8 who make it to the finals? No idea.
 
Besides, who am I to be judging anyone, anyway?
 
And don’t even get me started on decimals…which is like the ultimate splitting-hairs hedge option. An hour of my life disappeared as I grappled with “is it 9.4 or 9.3”? Yeah.
 
In my day-job, the rule is to always give patients the benefit of the doubt. Easy enough. Sounds like a good rule to use for the RITA’s.
 
Therefore, in all transparency, I present to you – how to score RITA entries – Dr. Jill style.
 
#1) The scale starts at 5 and stops at 10. We’re going to call this the “RITA gonad” scale. You have to have serious writerly balls to simply enter this contest. If you have the guts to write, edit, publish, and enter an entire book, the contents of which are still glowing with the pieces of your soul that you ripped out and laid down on the page – that’s automatically worth a minimum score of 5. Just for making the massive effort and taking a risk.

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#2) Genres I don’t read. Yikes. Here’s how I scored these books. Even if I didn’t dig the genre, I went with quality of writing + overall quality of book + imagining myself as a reader who capital-L Loved that genre and how they would respond to the book + an extra 0.5 points because I feel like my limited experience with certain genres puts those entries at a disadvantage. So. Lowest store possible on a genre I typically never, ever read? 5.5. (TBH, I kept looking for a secret power to shoot out of the sweet Amish woman’s fingers, or for the prim Regency lady to suddenly whip out nun chucks and just start wailing on the bad guy. Sorry, but welcome to my world.)
 
#3) Hot (or appealing), supportive dude + strong, confident heroine bonus. If the author gets that right, I’m tacking on 0.5 extra points automatically.
 
#4) Cliché deduction. Ok, show of hands. Who backs up a truck full of cliché’s and dumps them into their first draft? Yeah, me too. That’s why my editor has a fiesta calling out each and every one of them in my manuscripts. So, I've got a heightened sensitivity to them because that's my bad habit. A few cliché’s are fine, because maybe you can’t sanitize them completely away. But 15+ in a short novel? As my editor says: “You can do better.” Clichés are minus 0.5-1.0, depending on how distracting they are.
 
#5) Awesome cover bonus. Doesn’t have to be fancy, but should convey a sense of the book and have interesting images. Sexy abs are a plus. Extra few decimal points for how well the cover is put together.
 
#6) Sleep-deprivation bonus. Sleep is precious and sometimes rare. If your book keeps me up past my bedtime or makes me borderline-late for work, that’s an extra 1.0 point. No book has yet made me miss a delivery. That would be like 25 points on the 1-10 scale.

​​#7) Author props bonus. If the author did something really cool with a standard trope in such a way to make me go “wow, that’s pretty awesome”, that’s an automatic 0.5-1.0 points added right there.

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#8) Grammar police deduction. No, I’m not the world’s best grammarian, so if I notice grammar errors (again, needs to be >5 to get annoying), then that’s 0.5 points off.
 
#9) Next in series bonus. If I’m picking up my Kindle and downloading everything else the author has written, based on the RITA entry, that’s like 1.5 extra points.
 
#10) Gestalt point. All right. Sometimes when I enter a patient room in the office or hospital, I’m hit with a blast of that’s-not-right or things-will-be-fine. There is no science behind it. There are no superpowers involved. It’s just a gut feeling. Even a finely edited book can still be “off”. Or a good book can have that intangible “something extra”. We’ll call these “gut points”, 0.5 points either way on pure instinct.

Agree or disagree, I’m certain there are a million ways to score RITA entries. It’s certain that some writers will be thrilled and others horrified by this scale. I’d love to hear how other authors/judges approach scoring RITA entries. Maybe I can incorporate these other authors’ scales into next year’s judging.

Sometimes writers are just too tired to write. Sometimes we have day jobs or families or general insanity that sucks up every last minute of the day. Well, now what?
 
 During this week's call block, I started thinking about everything I get done besides writing when I'm on call. Here goes...
 
#1) Blogs. Ta-dash. Case in point.

 
#2) Research. This activity fits well into small, interrupt-able attention packets, which is nice when the ICU + med-surg floor + Ob unit + ER + 5 nursing homes all have my number on speed dial. You know it’s been a bad weekend when the switchboard operator at the hospital begins her spiel with an apology. Sometimes a few minutes of research is nice. Like thinking about really hot men and how they might fit into a novel, hypothetically-speaking of course. Yum!

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#3) Catch up on TV shows. With the remote control that lets me pause in the middle of stuff.
 
#4) Catch up on reading. Heretical comment to follow. Sorry. I know they say we should read all the time and every single day, but I really do think the “read daily” and “write daily” has to do with folks not slogging through 80-100 hrs that week + going in at night to deliver or admit patients. Again. Maybe I’m simply a big ol’ weenoid, but my noggin gets numb after 10 straight days of 24/7 calls, hospital work, and lots of interruptions.
 
#5) Stare into space and think about stuff. No joke. I don’t feel guilty doing it, either, since I’m on call and cannot be depended on to produce any other goods or products during this time.
 
#6) Upkeep on website, Amazon author page, and Goodreads.
 
#7) Plan vacations. Lordie have mercy, I can spend hours on end looking for destinations and flights. Latest obsessions? Black Hills and Scotland and Wales.

(that's Snowdonia National Park in Wales, BTW)

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#8) Tweet more
 
#9) Clean the house. Because when I’m in the writing mode, no cleaning takes place. (Please reference the blog about fastdrafting: Fastdrafting a Full-Length Novel: Part 2.) When on call, I can do cleaning between phone calls or (in the case of dusting) during phone calls. Multitask win!
 
#10) Work stuff. I try to catch up on paperwork, administrata, CME courses, licensing/credentialing bits and pieces during the call block. Might as well. I’m already thinking about medicine anyway. Use the time to get some relevant tasks done. And free up time for writing later!

​Hate “springing forward”? Not me! Why daylight savings time is fabulous
 
It's understandable -- most people feel hung over on Monday from “springing forward”. Enter lots of grumbles. But here’s why I love DST….
 
#1) Taking hospital call on the spring time change weekend? 1 less hour of call is always a good thing!
 
#2) The cats’ circadian rhythms are less aggressive at 5am. For a while.
 
#3) Leaving work in the dark isn’t any fun. There’s something to be said for going for a walk after work.
 
#4) I’m a morning person.
 
#5) Who wants to wake up at 6 or 6:30 and it’s already light out? Not me. It’s nice to get some dark-to-dawn so as to ease into the day.

#1) How come everyone speaks American English? (Ok, besides Jean Luc Picard, but he’s really French or something.) Did America win the universe and now every place in the galaxy has to speak standard English?
 
#2) How do we know that the entire series isn’t all happening inside of Q’s little snow globe of amusement?
 
#3) Rock climbing in the holodeck. How high can you really go?
 
#4) Why no changing rooms near the holodeck? Remember the mud bath with Mrs. Troi, Worf, and Alexander? Did they track mud through the ship until they got back to their quarters? Or did the mud magically disappear because it came from…a holodeck?
 
#5) How come only the Romulans and Klingons get cloaked vessels? That’s a bit unfair to all the Vulcans, humans, and well -- everyone else -- in the universe...
 
#6) In between pushing the “go” and “stop” buttons, what exactly does the ensign do in the front seat on the bridge? Seems kind of boring after a while.
 
#7) Starship Enterprise holds 1,000 people/crew. Where’s all that waste go? You never see a janitor.
 
#8) How do they get fresh milk?
 
#9) You never see them hitting space debris at warp 5. I wonder what that would do to your average un-shielded starship.
 
#10) Q: The quintessential deus ex machina storytelling device. Really? It just seems too…easy and obvious.