All the pieces are in place now, and it didn’t even require me calling in a favor from a to-be-named-later Frisco Dentist. I have all the assets in place, the responses back, and now it’s just a matter of time to plan and post.

That’s right, ScriptSuperhero.com’s exclusive interview with novelist Charlaine Harris will begin very soon. It’s a long, comprehensive interview that takes us into areas few interviews have traveled with Ms. Harris. So it should be a blow-out even for her fans, as well as aspiring novelists.

I will start the process soon and once the interview begins appearing, I will have it appear in several parts, each part appearing at one minute before midnight each night until the interview is complete. So be sure to tune in… soon!

A lot of novelists who never complete a manuscript and remain unpublished go by the old reliable excuse that time is so hard to come by. Here’s a little revelation for you: time is always hard to come by, even for published authors.

The biggest difference between being published and not being published is finishing projects. That’s it. That’s all. Whether its a phenphedrine review for a health magazine, a short story for Ellery Queen or a novel for the fantasy section… no one is willing to publish an unfinished manuscript.

Sure, even a finished manuscript can be bad and avoid publication… but finding the time to finish a project vastly improves its odds for reaching published status.

It’s enough to make a person turn to diet pills. Or not. The point is, I had to wipe me entire hard drive and do a complete system restore over the weekend. It wasn’t a hard drive failure, this time; just some sort of corrupted system file that was serious enough to require a complete system restore.

Fortunately, my novel’s intact thanks to a very reliable 2GB flash drive. But I’m starting to have some serious hate-on for Windows Vista since it seems like I lose everything on my hard drive about every six months since I made the switch to Vista. So now I can’t wait for System 7, which had BETTER fix all this crap.

I did lose a fair amount of data, but nothing critical this time; I am now more committed than ever, though, to buying a second hard drive that will ghost the content of my primary drive.

Start the buzz, folks! Get those cellular phones a ringing. I am now able to announce confidently that the surprise guest interview I’ve lined up for ScriptSuperhero.com is with no other than New York Times bestselling author Charlaine Harris.

Harris, whose Sookie Stackhouse novels have been transformed by producer Alan Ball into the HBO hit series True Blood, which began its second season Sunday night, agreed to a long, generous, expansive interview touching on Sookie and her other creations, but mostly focused in the craft of novel writing.

This interview will be published in several parts starting very soon, possibly tonight, and with each part debuting at – when else? – midnight the following night, until we’ve run the gamut with Ms. Harris. Don’t miss out! This is one of the most in-depth interviews ScriptSuperhero may never land with an author of this caliber!

Some people spend their lives searching for the best diet pill, but I’ve found that once I get wrapped up in what I’m writing, I focus in quite intently and often forget entire meals.

Of course, that’s technically starving yourself rather than actually dieting, so maybe it’s not the best way to go about shedding pounds. Because actually, it’s better to keep yourself alive. So on second thought, don’t use writing to lose weight; use it to gain readers!

While I usually fill this blog with my own thoughts on writing and the craft of word-smithing, I am happy to say that I have a big surprise coming soon. In fact, I will be interviewing a very friendly and nice… and also, very recognizable… New York Times bestselling author.

I’ll be asking this individual a lot of questions, mostly focused around the craft of writing, but also how this person’s career and life intertwine. And I’ve submitted many questions that, I hope, this person is not often asked. So if this individual has the time to answer all the questions I submitted, I’ll probably break the interview down into multiple parts so that it’s not one overwhelmingly-long post.

Believe me, this is someone with plenty of novel-writing under the belt, whose experiences and opinions will be an education for everyone… me included! Sure, some people would rather read the facts about mesothelioma, but there are better sites than this one for that! (Thus the link.) No, we’re all about writing here at ScriptSuperhero.com, and once I finalize this interview by receiving the author’s responses back… well, I think everyone will be more than a little thrilled.

In fact, one could even venture to say my readers will be thrilled to dead!

I’ve learned how memory can save your butt if you’re a writer, the hard way. Whether it’s a compact flash card or a full-on flash drive, it’s important to back up your work as a writer, and the more ways you have it backed up, the better.

I learned this when I lost 100-plus pages of a manuscript (among a lot of other vital stuff) when my PC’s hard drive failed last winter. It took me nearly six months to get energized to dig back into the project, and only now am I clicking away again.

So it’s vital; let my tale be the cautionary one that advised you to back up everything you care about – especially your writing projects!

Sometimes it feels like you almost have to know your characters better than you know your spouse, to be a successful writer. While I love my wife, I can’t say I know all her habits backward and forward. That isn’t essential in a marriage; but to write a novel, you have to know if your female lead uses eye cream or not before bed – something you may not want to be aware of with a spouse.

It’s odd and it feels almost like neglecting your spouse, to know your characters so well. But then, that’s just another good reason to always make sure that I take my wife out once a week on our date night. After all, you can’t snuggle up to a warm character at night… so it’s good to keep those priorities in line.

I want to create a ghost who’s touchable. That the goal with my latest project. I’m tired of the old conventions that insist a ghost passes through everything and is mere mist. What’s scary about mist? A ghost who is touchable, however, has more impact. You don’t even know you’re being haunted until it’s far too late.

While it may not be as technical as a manual on installing Delta fauctes, believe it or not in the supernatural mystery world, people really care about “the rules” of the supernatural world. However, my job as a novelist is to tell a compelling mystery and you just can’t have that with the stereotypical ghosts found in so many novels.

Mine will be different.

I’m finally making progress again on my first Pizza Delivery Mystery novel, Thirty Minutes Or Less. Longtime readers will remember I lost over 100 surplus pages of manuscript during a hard drive crash in which I had no data backup. It’s been a long road toward working up the energy to tackle the novel afresh, but I finally have.

I’ve taken my wife’s advice and found a whole new approach to the plot, jumping ahead in the novel’s timeline after the prologue so that I can get my main character to the action, the novel’s main premise, and all of the important characters that much faster. I am envisioning about a third of the novel taking place in a sort of “frame/flashback” structure before the plot catches up to current action and unreels from there.

This new approach makes me feel more confident about the novel than I did the first time through; by getting to the important stuff earlier, the elements that I believe will hook readers are there early on. That is what will make this novel stand out.

Lately I’ve been putting in a lot of long nights but not getting any creative writing done, even though the engines are turning up in the ol’ creative noggin. It’s frustrating that I’ve spent more time pondering the best acne treatment lately than I have a character’s motivation for murder despite being innocent.

So I guess the key to all this is simply making time and re-prioritizing my life. That would get most of the roadblocks out of the way.

My wife will be the first to tell you she’s not a writer. Or at least she thinks she’s not; I suspect there’s a lot more talent hidden below the surface than she gives herself credit for.

This past weekend was a prime example; instead of walking around a store looking at iPhone accessories, we went to a quite restaurant on our date night and I confided in her the struggles I was having regaining traction on my novel.

She offered several sharp-minded suggestions that hadn’t occurred to me, and that will allow me to get to my novel’s main point of interest a lot sooner, while allowing me to get back to “writing fresh” in first-draft mode, which is definitely a roadblock for me these last weeks.

When in doubt, folks… talk to your spouse! It might be the best writer’s block cure of all!