Robyn's Nest

The End of 2011

2011-12-30T00:05:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I'm sitting here in the last days of 2011 thinking back over the year, trying to remember good times, bad times, and what was memorable.

That... is a problem. I really can't remember anything memorable.

I mean, we took a vacation to see family in California this past Thanksgiving, and that is most definitely noteworthy, considering we hadn't been back in four years. But what happened otherwise?

Every time I think of something, it dawns on me that, nope, that was LAST year. "Oh, my parents came to visit for 3 weeks." Nope last winter they did, but they left before New Year. "Oh! My best friend visited." Nope, last year too. My in-laws took a trip up this summer, and that was nice, but they often do that.

What did I do for Valentine's Day? No clue. What about Spring Break? Honestly can't recall. Hubby got a real good job, which is awesome beyond belief after the crap he's been through. This summer? In-laws visited, went to the coast for a day, saw some museums... otherwise I didn't do much. What did I do for my birthday? Well, we saw Phantom of the Opera and that was awesome. We had that flood upstairs that drenched us downstairs, guh, not something to be remembered. My hubby finally got the electric guitar he was obsessing over for months. We missed Talk Like A Pirate Day. We sort of ignored Halloween. I never got to go to a write-in for NaNoWriMo. Then I had an abscessed tooth that laid me up for many weeks with a fever and swollen face before I finally found a dentist who would pull it. The 8 days in California were awesome, at least. My hubby didn't really want to do anything for his birthday and just wanted Pizza Hut. Christmas was pretty quiet, just dinner with the uncle. New Year's Eve looks like it'll be quiet too.

The thing that will stand out about 2011 is my plunge into fan fiction. I tested the waters out last year, but this past summer was when I discovered the manga Fairy Tail and got sucked in. I'm now making a bit of a name for myself (or at least "Rhov") writing for the Fairy Tail community. "Lion's Pride" is my own little source of pride. I've been meeting other aspiring writers, and although I think the average age is 17, it's still nice to chat with new people. I feel like an elderly sage giving them advice. Maybe it's a short-lived obsession, but I will likely keep writing fanfics for Fairy Tail in 2012, at least finishing up the stories I've started.

Otherwise, I did very little writing, no noteworthy photography, I'm playing percussion instead of my darling trombone until I get the rest of my dental work done, didn't go sailing, didn't get to walk along the beach despite being in Astoria this summer and being in California only minutes from the beach! I missed the Perseid meteor shower for maybe the first time ever, I didn't get to pick blackberries, I did almost nothing for NaNoWriMo... sort of a let-down of a year.

Except in fan fiction... which is sort of an ephemeral fame, people adore your writing but forget about it the next day as they read the avalanche of verbose tripe that overwhelms that site every hour.

Now 2012 is looming like that shadow you feel before you see. There are, of course, dooming theories about this upcoming year. We had enough "end of the world" prophecies this year. Nothing happened. People thought the "Occupy" movement would rock the foundations of society. Nothing happened. So maybe we're getting jaded. Even if we knew for certain the day and hour Armageddon was coming, half the population would still say, "Well, if it comes, it comes, I ain't waiting for it to end." Maybe the Mayans knew something, maybe they just ran out of room and the Mayan calender is the Y2K of the ancient world.

In any case, I'll keep writing, I'll keep trying to get published, I'll complete that fanfic I've started, I'll keep hoping I can one day finish Shadowstrider, and I'll continue to be a loving wife, a good child, a musician, a writer, a sailor, and a geek girl... all for the price of one!

I ain't waiting for it to end.

OTP

2011-11-19T04:04:00.001-08:00

OTP

One True Pairing

I write fan fiction, obviously. I have two accounts, one that is clean and one that I created to "hide" my more risque works. They're not necessarily all about sex, mind you. Rated M is also for blood and gore, or in general for "adult themes." One of my stories is Rated M because the girl gets drunk and flashes her boobs. Nothing happens until the very end... when she gets her first kiss. Yup, it's that non-sexual! But it's still M.

And then there are the ones that define "Rated M," stories that will make you blush and will probably make my parents disown me. It's taken me years to break down my barriers as a writer, to be strong enough to not simply write "they kissed and tumbled back onto the bed; then the next morning..." but to write some content into what the audience can already guess was a wild night of raw passion. I guess I really didn't feel adequate to write material like that until I got married. "Write what you know"... right?

And with fanfiction, I have an audience eager to read "those sorts of stories." In fact, they thrive on it.

When I saw in the Fairy Tail listing on Fanfiction.net that there are 25 Rated-M stories about the character Loke, and 5 are mine (well, 6 if you count the French translation of "Lion's Pride" that Meijishi is uploading) I realized I have two problems: one, I'm obsessed with Loke (hell, I even wrote a slash with him); two, I have a very perverted mind (did I mentioned the slash...with Natsu?)

These are all of my Loke stories, including the "clean" ones on my "good girl alter-ego" account:

Box of 'Nip - clean and cute, although technically Loke is "stoned" on catnip
Cat Bath - so dirty, it had to take place in a shower
Crouching Lion, Horny Dragon - slash... also the worst title EVER! But too funny to change it.
Ephemeral Sakura, Eternal Love - M for gore and drunken booby flashes.
From Lion To Kitten - Loke and Lucy as children... uber cuteness!
Kitty Licks - just as perverted as you're imagining
Lion's Pride - my epic and serious piece... except for the lemon in chapter one. I probably scare people away with that.
Quest for the Master Key - song-fic about Loke and Lucy
Sayonara, Saiai No Shishi - Japanese for "Farewell, Beloved Lion." Seriously, the saddest story I have ever written.

OTP means "one true pairing," and in fanfics it's the couple you personally think make the perfect pair. It might be the obvious main protagonist and main heroine, or it might be the obscure villain who had a shared past with the heroine. Reasons vary as wildly as just who should match up.

For me, Fairy Tail's main girl Lucy belongs with the Spirit of the Lion, the one character who has so far confessed his love to her (although she brushed him off) and the one whose life she saved: Loke, AKA Leo the Lion. There are too many reasons why I think Lucy and Loke belong together, why they are my OTP, rather than pairing her with Natsu or Gray.

Well... maybe Gray. He's cute too. Don't even tempt me to write a slash about Loke and Gray... yummm!

Yup, I need a cure to my obsession. Maybe I'll adopt a ginger cat and name him Loke. It'll be very awkward to write lemons with my kitty staring at me.

(For non-fanfic folks, "slash" means homosexual love, "lemon" means explicit sexual content.)

One Week In

2011-11-07T02:56:00.000-08:00

One week in, and I'm starting to hate my story. This is probably a record. Sometimes I grow to hate it around Day 15, but no... I started to hate this story at about Day 3, and as I sit here drinking hot cocoa and rum, medicating my chronic insomnia the bad way, I'm staring at Chapter 4 and realizing... I simply do not like my story.

Perhaps it's because I have another story I put on hiatus in order to do Nanowrimo. I'm tempted to work on that story as a "dream sequence" of this story. Or maybe my MC sits down to watch TV, and this "show" comes on. I don't know, but I can't just put that other story out of my head. I tied it up at a neat little spot so I could focus all attention onto Nanowrimo, but now... I just can't focus.

The fact that I'll be leaving to California in two weeks and staying there until December means I need to put even more effort into these first couple weeks. I should be at least around 35k before leaving Portland, because I know I'll have almost no time to write while I'm gone. This is turning out to be the hardest Nanowrimo since my very first attempt. I don't want to break my 5-year winning streak, but this apathy is draining all my creativity like a... like a... hell, I can't even think up of a good simile.

So... any suggestions? How can I fall back in love with my characters? What tricks are there to revitalizing my enthusiasm for my plot? Besides chocolate and rum, which obviously aren't working, what other sacrifices to the Muses should I offer? And am I cheating if I make a "dream sequence" so I can work on another project without sacrificing my precious free time?

Why Fan Fiction?

2011-11-03T03:28:00.000-07:00

Up until this year, like many other writers, I scoffed the idea of fan fiction. The characters were not original, the setting was already made up by the author, so really all a fanfic writer had to do was come up with a plot. And sometimes not even that much. "PWP" (plot-what-plot, or alternatively "porn without plot") is popular for a reason.

Not that I didn't sometimes dabble in writing Star Trek episodes. It can get addicting, certainly! But it seemed like every story I opened on Fanfiction.net was riddled with grammar errors and meandering plots. I think the infamous "My Immortal" Harry Potter fanfic epitomized the stereotype of bad (really bad) writing. So bad, I only managed three chapters before I felt physically ill.

Then a crazy plot dropped into my head, a novel-size story on Quantum Leap, my favorite show as a kid and what got me fascinated in history. So I set up an account and began uploading chapters. I discovered something unique in this experiment. Readers leave comments, and although 90% or them are simple "I liked this so please update soon," there are little gems out there, readers who want quality, will praise you if you deliver, and most important to me, readers who will gladly critique you. Sometimes harshly!

This equals instant gratification.

Coming Up With Lion's Pride

This summer, I got addicted to the manga Fairy Tail and of course began writing on that. It was a crazy idea, hooking up the two characters who I thought made the most adorable pair, the Spirit Mage Lucy and her Spirit of the Leo Constellation, a playboy named Loke. Lion's Pride was going to be one of those notorious PWP stories, except... I got rave reviews. On my first day of publishing, 77 people read the story, and many left reviews. By the end of the week, over 300 people had read this and wanted more.

Who was I to refuse!

So a second chapter went up. This time, 100 people read it on the first day. I was spurred on. My imagination, which had been plagued with writer's block, suddenly opened by the cheers of adoring readers who claimed this story of mine, one I put so little effort into, was one of those "diamonds in the rough" that are the treasure of Fanfiction.net.

My ego was rising with the helium of compliments, and with it my love for writing took flight once more.

That was in August. By the end of that month, I had six chapters up and about 250 regular readers with more drifting in every day. Through September, I regularly updated a chapter every four days, which was probably insane of me, except I was really falling in love with the story. My Muse could not be stopped. My day was filled with writing, editing, responding to reviews and private messages. One reader from France offered to translate my story. I'm still in shock that I can read my story in French! Corbleu! I chatted with a few readers who I now count as friends. For me, writing had never been so much fun!

October saw some problems. I sprained my wrist and could not type well. Still, I pushed onward, cutting down to a chapter a week. Then I needed emergency surgery. I had a buffer, so I kept updating even while bed-bound. I did not want to stop. I felt a duty to my readers. I had the whole story outlined. I wrote out the ending, since that is always the hardest for me.

On the side, I was still writing one-shots. The fans from Lion's Pride would read those as well. I had "followers," scary as that sounds. People began to notice my name in other places. "Rhov" was becoming something of a celebrity in my small circle of fanfic folks. My husband joked that I spent at least an hour a day replying to "fan mail."

I felt an obligation to keep my readers entertained.

This is not a feeling you get when you write a stand-alone novel. Maybe for epic series, but normally... "obligation to entertain" is not something solitary writers feel. Since I'm also a musician, I comprehend this emotion, and I'm amazed to feel it in writing as well. What sort of writer would also feel this drive and loyalty?

Mangaka! Or as most people would know it, Japanese comic artists. The same talented people I'm emulating.

I just published my 20th chapter tonight. It's November, Nanowrimo time, so I have stopped writing Lion's Pride. I have two more chapters in my buffer to wrap up Part One, and then I plan on taking a hiatus until December. I feel... sad. I know I need to stop obsessing, but I feel worried that if I stop now, the steam will fade away. I won't feel the same rush.

Then I look at how many people are just discovering this story. Every day, I pick up at least 5 new readers. Even if I need to take three weeks off for Nanowrimo, that means 100 new readers will be there to welcome me back.

So Why Fan Fiction?

Some of you might ask, why did I so suddenly venture into the tripe-filled cesspool of fan fiction? After all, it is a community overrun by teens who want to live out their Mary Sue dreams of being in an anime or falling for a movie star. Who wouldn't love to be swept into an adventure with Harry Potter, or have a vampire all to yourself? But why am I "sinking" to such a level?

I recently read a forum where a writer asked such a question. How is it that writers who obviously have talent would "demean" themselves by "wasting" such inspiration on something they could never get paid for?

Why would I waste three months writing Lion's Pride, a story where I must put a disclaimer that I do not own the rights to the manga, a story I cannot make money on, a story that--according to that particular forum writer--is a medium best occupied by teens still trying to grow in their feathers?

Simple answer: Instant gratification!

Think about it. You slave over your beloved novel, which may take a year to finish. You then spend months if not years being rejected by agent after agent, editor after editor. If you are deemed lucky enough to get your foot in the door, then you get your story shredded in editing, rewriting, until you think you are a horrible writer and it might be best if you left the whole thing to the editor. Finally, it gets published, and instead of an instant New York Times bestseller, you realize that selling a few hundred in the first week is the best you can do. Friends who said they would buy your book don't. Family might buy one copy and pass it around. Then you get reviews. The negative ones hit you hard, because these are there for the whole world to see. Your family questions why you would write such a thing. You slink back to your keyboard hoping that maybe the sequel will do better.

That is traditional publishing.

Here is Fan Fiction.

You write the first chapter. You do not even have to have the whole plot laid out. You stick it out there like sending your first 10 pages to an agent. Instead of months of rejections, within minutes you get reviews. Some praise you. Some correct you. You can instantly edit your story to help improve based on those comments. For each chapter, you garner more readers and more reviews. Every step of the way, you're boosted. True, some of these readers might not recognize tripe if it was shoved down their throats, but others are quite discerning. You still feel loved. When you finish the story, the writing process is over. You aren't plagued with the fear of months of upcoming rejections. It's already published! Your payment was during the writing phase, all those comments. You feel accomplished and enthusiastic to write more.

Fan fiction for me is a place where I can experiment. I can write on subjects that are too risqué. I can get feedback besides "We are not looking for this sort of story at this time." I can discover my strengths rather than get bombarded with my shortcomings. Fanfics make me love writing again.

Writing a story with characters from another story happens all the time. Shakespeare did it in many of his plays. Every fairy tale remake and comic-book-turned-movie could be considered "fan fiction" in a way. Except fanfic writers don't care about money. We do this for fun and for ourselves.

Saying that writers who write fan fiction is a waste of talent is like saying a doctor running a free clinic is a waste of talent. Money and profit do not even enter a fanfic writer's head. We wish to entertain and improve ourselves. Just because I'm published a few things does not mean I am the pinnacle of writing success. Hell no! I want to improve. I want others to read my stuff.

Hell, if I ever publish my novel, I would be giddy to sneak onto Fanfiction.net and write some slash between my characters. It's fun to free one's imagination.

That's why I write fan fiction.

If you want to read the story of stuff I do, you can read Lion's Pride, but do be careful. It's rated "M" for a reason.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7254845/1/Lions_Pride

Oh and... review my story! ^_^

Pacing Stories

2011-04-15T03:53:00.001-07:00

Pacing... it's the bane of any writer. I stress out a lot about this issue, and reading the helpful insights on Kristin Nelson's blog doesn't help my nerves.

It does, however, help my writing.

I'm getting a story prepared for submission. I wrote my query letter and sent it to a dozen or so close friends and writer buddies for critiquing. Of those, maybe three know what to look for and will give me the brutal advice I'm looking for, yet vague positive feedback from friends helps too.

So while I wait for feedback (only got two replies so far), I'm spazzing at 4am over the first thirty pages. Ideally, I should wait until I get a positive response, but I'm in a total writer's block, and reading anything besides vapid shojo manga is simply not appealing at the moment. Because I feel like I've wasted a day if I don't do at least something in my manuscripts, I'm thus spazzing.

Over thirty pages.
Condense, condense, condense!!!

I realized in my second draft of this story, I had done the dreaded "info dump." The first chapter was a literal history lesson. The main character sat in a classroom, hardly speaking, while her brother and his ex-wife, her nursemaid, fought over political issues, gender equality, and how to rule a clan.

Problems? 1) The audience had no clue who the main character was. In fact, the nursemaid sounded more like the MC. 2) No hints at what the big issue will be. Politics? Social issues? We learned about a troubled country, not about our beloved characters. 3) History classes are boring. So was this!

That chapter got scraped so hard, it went from 15 pages to three, and recently I trimmed it even more. A little info to realize we're in a matriarchal clan society, fine... but we don't need to know the whole fricking history of the country!

Now I'm tightening more. I wanted the first four chapters to fit in those 30 pages. The thing is, there's this castle. I describe the castle. I describe it loquaciously! Whereas it's great to step back and see an aerial view of the castle and land where this scene will take place, it does not have to fill up three pages of my first thirty pages. Those "Holy 30" make it or break it. Although it's an example of descriptiveness, something I have a weakness toward, it's telling, not showing. The plot isn't moving yet in these thirty pages.

There is so much that must happen before my main character meets the love interest, a whole royal ceremony to name her the heiress, hints about the main mystery, political allies and enemies to meet, her family and childhood friends who form the nebulous of her "five-man band."

Is this all good for pacing? Does the story lag? Am I getting into the meat of the story too slowly? How can I fix it?

These are legitimate issues that writers must deal with through time and learning, not just me being obsessive-compulsive again. Well, perhaps a little of that too. This manuscript was so challenging because I went into it not blind. I had the characters and their histories all worked out ahead of time, so I wanted to explain it all quickly. Now I'm reading these initial pages, and I'm seeing a grotesque info dump. It's scaring me!

Do I really think I'm ready to send this out? If even I, the author, am seeing issues, does the story stand a chance against the far-more-experienced eye of a literary agent?

I love this story. I want this to work.

I wish I had someone I trusted, someone who knew what things to look for in voicing and pacing and such, someone who would read my story and not just say "Yeah, it sounds great." I don't want praise! I want harsh criticism. I am a masochist when it comes to editing. I want to be beaten and whipped into shape, to have my story blood red with corrective ink.

However, I want someone to tell me my faults before I get my hopes up with sending in a query, then thirty pages, then a whole manuscript, just to have the agent say, "Sorry, but your pacing is all wrong." Reading Ms. Nelson's blog post reminded me of that little hidden fear in me. What if this was my story? What if she was reading it, and in 30 pages or even 100, it just wasn't working?

I want this to be perfect.

Yes, I'm obsessing... again. I need to stop doing this, but I'm not sure how without icky drugs.

Then again, by obsessing, I'm growing to become a better storyteller. For artists and writers, striving for perfection is not only recommended, it's practically mandatory! So I'll go back, tighten the belt of those thirty pages, while I wait for a response from an agent.

Wish me luck!

Sapere aude!

Writers Workshop Blues

2011-04-01T07:06:00.000-07:00

I'll be blunt. Some days, I need a swift kick in the rear.

I've really not been able to write for quite some time. Oh, I'm getting editing done, sure, but that's nowhere near as fulfilling as finishing a chapter of new content, fresh off the press of my imagination.

Nope, since at least December, it has been all editing work. Maybe a page here and there, but my brain has hit an Ayers Rock, a block in the middle of nowhere; or perhaps I should compare it to Auyantepui, the Devil's Mountain, where, ironically enough, Angel Falls tempts adventurers with a piss-shower from heaven... or hell? Whether I imagine my writers block as a sea cliff, a monolith, or the Great Trango, my metaphors fail to correct the problem of somehow surmounting this impasse.

And of course, I suck at rock climbing.

I thought sitting in with a writer's group would help. I don't know many writers around here, besides a few I've befriended during Nanowrimo. My lack of literary companions leaves me wishing I had made it to more write-ins. (Note to self: get over my social anxiety by next November.)

I was part of the White Knights Writers, but they disbanded before we really got a chance to get started. I'm far too shy to simply sit in with a group I don't know. I never feel "good enough" to be in the presence of such people. It's all about talking, and I communicate via keyboard, not vocalizations. If I could speak that eloquently, I would have gotten into radio.

Workshops can be outrageously brutal to the pocketbook. Tin House Summer Writers Workshop at Reed College costs $1,100 in tuition, meals & lodging $575, plus mentorship is $750-$1,000. A cheaper one is the Write to Publish Workshop at PSU, which is a mere $120 all day, or $35 for each workshop. What's a starving artist to do?

I can't recall my last writing workshop, it's been that long. This is not the longest writer's block I've had, but considering I haven't even been able to write anything more than one short poem and some snarky forum posts, it's perhaps the most complete writer's block.

At least I can read through old stuff, but grammar checks are the tofu to my smorgasbord of creativity. I need a kick in the pants, a stick of dynamite to blast this stupid rock so I can plow through without worrying about carabiners and climbing harnesses.

The best I can do at the moment is blog. That's...pathetic. But at least it's something.

So...anyone know a good writing group in the Portland (preferably Tigard/Tualatin area) with free meetings?

I love being snarky

2011-03-27T11:23:00.000-07:00

I woke up in a snarky mood. I was researching the top speed of the fastest human Usain Bolt, and of course I got distracted by animals. This led me to a site supposedly to teach kids, where it was stated that "the fastest animal on earth" was the cheetah. I was immediately alerted. "Nooo, don't teach our children ignorant things like this!" Fastest animal ON EARTH is so misleading.

Luckily, someone below gently corrected them... wrongly. Another poster made a claim for peregrine falcons. Another said some PBS show told him that ostriches were the fastest animals (seriously???) Another came in claiming sailfish were fastest, another said it was some insect (only because it could jump so fast given its small size) and some supposed cheetah trainer claimed gazelles were faster. It devolved into childish bickering between swift lovers, admirers of the peregrine falcon, and cheetah fans, as well as debates if "fastest animal on earth" meant on land on within the sphere of this planet. When two kids came in with "dude, I'm only 12 and I know the sailfish/gazelle/random-bird is slower" I just cracked up.

I felt it imperative to straighten all these idiots out before they went off teaching our children wrong things. And I was feeling snarky. I was also a little cranky at how stupid some people are. Maybe a hair bitter? Anyway, I posted this, then realized it was educational as well as insolent. And just maybe it'll stop the back-and-forth debate.

--

I gotta say, I couldn't even read half these posts without groaning at the stupidity of mankind. Arguing "fastest animal on earth means on land, no it means in all the world, no it means that's ever existed, no it means..." Sheesh, the 12-year-olds sound smarter! You middle school kids who are putting these adults in their places deserve a lifetime of cookies. The rest of these genetic rejects deserve to be eaten by cheetahs.

First off, the fastest fish is the sailfish, as some people above said, but it's only 68 mph, so it's slower than the cheetah. Saying "well it's got water resistance so that means on land it'd be faster than the cheetah" is as ignorant as saying if you tossed a cheetah out a plane, it'd be faster. Hell, if you want to talk about unnatural environments, just put me in the cockpit of an X-15.

Secondly, that pesky peregrine falcon seems to have caused a lot of confusion for the ignoramuses of the world. This lovely bird has been clocked in freefall at 260 mph, making some people claim it is "fastest." Properly, others have pointed out that this is its speed while in a dive. The peregrine falcon that was clocked at that speed was also thrown out a plane at 30,000 feet so it could be high enough to reach terminal velocity. That's cheating in my book.

Contrary to what others have posted, humans do not also freefall at this speed. There's a thing called AIR RESISTANCE which slows us down. Only in a vacuum do all things fall equally. Go back to high school. Or try copying the homework of one of the smart 12-year-olds.

As impressive as our bird-sans-parachute is, animal speed records are taken by HORIZONTAL movement (be it flight or running), because otherwise, let me run down the face of Grand Trango and I'll beat the pants off Usain Bolt.

In horizontal movement, the cheetah beats all other land animals at claims (not proven) of 75 mph, and a record made by the cheetah Sarah of 70 mph. In horizontal flight, the spine-tailed swift is the fastest bird at 106 mph. The peregrine falcon doesn't even land in the top ten for its horizontal speed. It falls fast, that's all. It's not the "fastest" by how experts measure animal speeds. Otherwise, go test your speed at terminal velocity until you surpass 260 mph. But remember, parachutes mess up air resistance. Don't wear one. Darwin will cheer you on.

If you want to argue that the peregrine falcon is the fastest animal in the world, first ask the folks over at Guinness to change their rules. Offer them cookies. If they're as naive as some of the people who posted here, they'll fall for it.

A Ginger Step into the Mire of Fanfic

2010-12-05T19:48:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I wrote a fan fiction.

It's not my first. Matt and I worked together on two, one a Quantum Leap story that we never finished, the other one a Star Trek: Voyager piece (it was all a dream). However, writing slash fiction is new, and an experiment I'm hesitant about. I've written love scenes before, beautiful collisions of passion, but never something wild, brutal, and... never gay.

Maybe because I'm not a man, so I don't fully understand the "sweet mystery of life" as it pertains to the hairier sex, and I'm not into girls, but... I just never bothered writing homosexual love scenes before. Heck, I once wrote a love scene between a human female and an alien who got his kinks having his ear licked, but never two people of the same sex. Such a deprivation in my repertoire had to be corrected. What better venue than the mired bog of fanfic!

This was indeed a challenge, a way to open myself up as a writer, expand that sanitary attic, tackle the bareback boundaries of the bedroom. I picked a manga ripe with homoerotic overtones: One Piece. Face it, even the artist plays around with the idea that Zoro and Sanji would make a great gay couple.

In fan fiction circles, this running gag has become reality. I read some of this stuff (as with all fan fiction, 10% is decent, 90% is a mawkish excuse for cheap porn). It's funny how certain the fanfic community is about Sanji and Zoro's relationship. And not just them. The two women aboard the Thousand Sunny are, of course, made into slutty pirates who will do anyone in anyway and in anyplace, although the crow's nest seems to be preferable.

Before you gawk and scream "OMG, how could you even think to write such smut?!?" please be warned, this is an experiment. I've done writing experiments in the past. This is like an artist who paints nudes purely to gain a better appreciation for the human body. Perhaps they are personally uncomfortable with nudity, but it can be artistic too.

My goal was to write a homosexual love scene and keep it artistic while still being raw and... fulfilling, for lack of a better word. I wanted more than "yo, Sanji, love hotel, let's do it" followed by page after page of way-too-textbook lovemaking and 70s porno dialog of moans. I wanted angst, passion, memories flashing through the mind, regret, awkwardness... everything writers tend to leave out in fanfics.

So... here we go!

Memories in a Bubble - a One Piece erotica fanfic

If you are under the age of 18, do not read this.
If you are offended by profanity, do not read this.
If you are offended by homosexuality, do not read this.
If you are offended by sexual content, do not read this.

Otherwise, enjoy!

Sapere aude!

The End of NaNo

2010-12-01T16:39:00.000-08:00

Notice I have not written in a month. This is because of that once-a-year nightmare and miracle called "National Novel Writers Month." During NaNoWriMo, I magically transform from a hermit sitting in my darkened apartment typing with feverish fervor, to a "WRITER"... nay, even more, a "NOVELIST." The special effects team never arrived, though, so the transformation looked less like Sailor Moon...

... and more like what I was doing before, only a little more insane and pressed for time.

The last two Nanowrimo contests, I pushed for the Double NaNo, writing a novel, not just 50,000 words long, but 100,000. I did it, too. This year, knowing publishers do not like epic tomes, I decided to aim for something a bit more humble. I finished the month at 80,780 (I like round numbers).

The story lacks only one more chapter, a scene I skipped because I'm not sure what to do with it. Lizby is in Purgatory, and as she is being led back to the "world," she is shocked to see that her mother, whose sudden death led to her own suicide, is in Purgatory too and about to be led away to whatever task she must do. It's supposed to be a real tear-jerking scene, but I'm stuck. I'll wait a few weeks to let my brain rest.

So what's next for this writer? Well, I have a few people who want to read Last Days, so I'll finish that up. I also want to do another read-thru of Daughters of Ashby because my dad wants to read it. Yikes! I never let my parents read my stuff, it's embarrassing!

Eventually, I want to return to my roots, to Shadowstrider, and finish the last book. Even if I'm left with an issue of what to do with novels that exceed 300k words, I at least want to finish the series. A morbid part of me wants it completed before my stereotypical untimely death, at which time Shadowstrider will be discovered and turned into another post-mortem classic.

A more practical side of me, the one who ignores the Keatses and Poes of the writing world, wants to finish it so I can look at the entire arc of the story and break it into bite-size bits. Or set it aside and publish a bunch of novels that become huge hits so I can pull a "Robert Jordan" and publish Shadowstrider as-is, 300k words and all, and no publisher will glare at me. No, they will joyously accept this epic tome with dollar signs in their eyes and Hollywood on the phone.

MWAHAHAHA!!!

Ahem, yes, that is the more "practical" side of my life. Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia, after all.

My Nano Novel: Last Days

2010-10-14T20:37:00.000-07:00

I've been piddling around on which story to pick for this year's Nanowrimo. Usually I pick an outline that has been sitting on my computer for years, waiting to be told. Last year I invented an entirely new story, coming up with about 30 characters, an entire plot, and a few key scenes all in about two days and only a week before November 1st. This year, I'm picking something that has waited almost a year for attention.

I had first decided upon my Jane Austen-esque YA novel, The Gardens of Bidding Hall, something I began in 1995 for my Junior English class in high school. It wasn't received too well, at least not the first chapter. My teacher said, "You write along the same principles as Charles Dickens, going on elaborate tangents which, eventually, all tie together, but leaves the reader guessing at their importance in the meantime." To this day, I'm not sure if that was a compliment or a criticism. I assume it was both. Anyway, I thought I had only the first couple chapters written and an outline for the last scene, I checked it again and I've already written 22,000 words, nearly halfway through the Nanowrimo goal of 50,000 words, so that one's a no-go.

Then I realized I had this mainstream fiction "what if the afterlife is all bureaucratic" type of story, nothing but a rough outline, a first paragraph, and the last page written out. That's more in the spirit of Nanowrimo, to write something from almost scratch, notes and outlines allowed, but not completed chapters.

Thus... (drum roll please) ... Last Days will be my Nano novel this year. Huzzah!

---

"Welcome to the Last Days. Be sure to fill out all forms."

Elizabeth "Lizby" Siddall has recently killed herself. She ends up in the Last Days Department, a bureaucratic sub-section in Purgatory for people who commit suicide with no other major sins against them. They are given the duty of living out the last days of terminal patients who have prayed for God to end their suffering. They have a time period in which they must live through the sufferings of that person, anywhere from a few days to weeks. They have some flexibility in what they do with their time, but there are plenty of rules.

1) Don't reveal anything about the afterlife.
2) Don't cause the death of others.
3) Don't do anything that might damn your host.
4) Don't kill your host.
5) Don't save your host.

But when Lizby is put into the body of an old man who doesn't have to die, she begins to want to live... and that's against the Last Days rules.

---

Like it? The plan is that each chapter follows what person she "possesses," seeing different lives, feeling physical pains, witnessing emotional upheavals of those realizing the person is about to die, and slowly being redeemed.

It follows religious ideas I don't personally believe in, but it's a fun story. The idea of a literal bureaucratic purgatory is fun, and this will also be my first attempt at writing an entire novel in first person. I experimented with that in I Saw Lydia Cry, another not-quite-completed novel, where Lydia is telling her story first person, a journal she left behind, but many pages are missing, so the story is interspersed with interviews of the other characters who fill in the missing gaps plus details Lydia herself never knew. I'd like to tackle that story again; however, I wrote it in 1994, so it's outdated politically and technologically and in dire need of a plot overhaul, not something for Nanowrimo.

So this is a good change for me, something more mainstream, something actually publishable. I have hopes in it, and hopefully the economy changes so I can publish some of these things. Bad economy means bad book sales, so I have to put everything on hold... grrr! >:(

[activate optimism]
Which means it's time to build up a buffer of novels!
Weee, Nanowrimo Time Is Here!
[optimism activated]

Getting Closer to NaNo

2010-10-14T20:05:00.000-07:00

It's about that time again, when I finish up whatever projects I have open, clear my mind from the inundating world I've been scuba diving through for months, and try to set myself up for something fresh, something new, something crazy and wonderful.

National Novel Writers Month - a.k.a Nanowrimo.

I'm already on the forums and chatting away with other writers. I've just finished what I hope will be my final draft of last year's Nano novel, Daughters of Ashby, which turned into a 2-parter both measuring slightly over 150k words. That's sort of big, but it's a historical fantasy so I hope it's not considered too long.

I also have my "brain break" novel ready. Sometimes I just have to break away from the novel I'm working on and try something totally different for a day or two. This is dangerous during Nanowrimo when a writer is aiming to create a 50,000-word novel in 30 days, but for me it's mandatory for my creativity. So my brain break will be my first Nano novel, Ghost Coast, which sadly did not win, coming to a dead halt at 42k word, 8k short of the goal but ended as a completed novel. I've since rearranged a whole lot, cut and pasted the entire timeline of events, and added an intense romantic element which I hope helps with sales. To complete my remake, I need to add three chapters. That's my brain break.

Other necessities to setting up for Nanowrimo is non-messy snacks for writing sessions (nothing that will gunk up my keyboard), lots to drink, and a plan for what days I can go out for write-ins. I tried attending write-ins for the first time last year, and it was loads of fun. Just sitting in a room with fifty other novelists is somehow inspiring, knowing I'm not alone in this creative force. I think our Muses combine and reinforce one another.

I'm currently reading The Various Shades of Fangline by Colby Purcell, which she posted on Blogger one chapter at a time, much of it being pushed out through November. I like that idea. I don't have a big following like her (although, if I could draw better, I would totally turn some of my stories into online comics) but perhaps I can get opinions, comments, and generally a good idea if what I'm doing works. Posting chapters online is dangerous (anyone could steal it) but I might give it a go. Still debating this idea.

OCD and Writing

2010-09-10T15:20:00.000-07:00

I've never been diagnosed, but I know I have OCD. I've spent hours in a store, there only to buy a couple items, but I get crazy trying to reorganize their jewelry display by ring size and color, or books by author ("waah, who put Steven King next to W.E.B. Griffin?"), or sometimes just reorganizing items by size. Like the photo frames at Dollar Tree. I have a big problem walking by those.

I wish my OCD ran toward other things, like keeping my carpet vacuumed, or washing the dishes spotless. Sadly, I could not care less about those things. Meanwhile, my library is alphabetical by genre (fiction, non-fiction, with a separate category for novelized movies and Matt's huge Star Trek collection). My CDs are also by artist and genre (jazz, classical, modern, I don't go too crazy because of cross-genre artists), and my DVDs are alphabetized by title. I used to alphabetized my spices, but now I clump them by cuisine (Italian spices, Asian spices, Mexican spices, etc.) Maybe it's because I worked in the school library starting in 4th grade, but I'm obsessed with ABCs.

OCD and writing are a hard mix. Usually, I start with just writing. I get an idea, sometimes plot it out, often not, and GO! When I'm in that mode, I write, and I don't stop, not for food, not for sleep. I've gone for weeks on 3-hour naps because I'm up all night writing until I'm literally typing in my sleep (crazy weird crap written in the moments of fading consciousness) then jolt awake with a great idea and write some more... for 21 hours straight.

Editing gets fun with OCD. I've read that most writers hate editing their stories. They have this great tale, and they don't want to change it. Steven King suggests shelving new manuscripts for months. Yeah, I have to do that in the final stage, but I still go into a frenzy when I'm in "Edit Mode." I've been known to sporadically scrap a newly written manuscript and rewrite the whole thing, all because I came up with a great idea. Don't worry, I keep multiple drafts, because sometime my mania-driven "great idea" turns out to be really stupid.

I obsess over grammar, yet I speak with some Southern peculiarities. "It needed done" is my husband's favorite. I never catch them, not after years.

"Why did you rewrite this? It was a great chapter!"
"It needed fixed."
O.o "Do you mean... it needed to be fixed?"
>_< (grrr) "Yeah..." I also obsess over my character's names, often for stupid reasons. For example, in my manuscript Daughters of Ashby, all of the characters and place names are after trees, with a few shrubs thrown in because I liked the names. While some are obvious (Linden, Hazel, Willow, Mimosa, Palmetto), and others are not too hard to figure out (Olivetta, Betulla, Quennel, Garnock, Mandel, Avalbane, Feàrn, Verbina), some of my favorite names are really obscure... probably not even names for people (Serenoa, Catalpa, Quercus, Tilia, Cedrus, Zelkova, Quillaja). I did hours upon hours of research. In every edit, I change at least one person's name to fit a plant that better describes their personality. It's probably all a waste, but I find research fun. Why all trees? I have no frickin' idea. I needed a bunch of names, so I looked on some baby name website, searched for tree names, and from there it all went crazy. I can count on one hand how many things are not named after trees (one is a horse).

So what am I obsessing over now? Editing! (insert maniacal grin of impending doom) Adding chapters, removing chapters, rummaging through old manuscripts written from before I discovered that publishers don't want 300k-wordcount tomes and breaking them into trilogies. I'm currently working on what I guess will be the second book of the Blue Fire Dragon series (yes, series... sadly, it looks to be 7 books long, not at all what I wanted!) I'm bouncing every week or so between Daughters of Ashby, Blue Fire, Ghost Coast, and sometimes I try to add a page or two to my eternally-on-hiatus Shadowstrider, which must one day be faced with breaking it down to publishable size, as much as I hate doing that AGAIN!

I just can't keep on task. Sometimes I obsess over a story, sometimes I obsess over a process. I feel like I'm drifting aimlessly, but I know at least some work is getting done, even if it's in a discursive way.

Each Day is a Mountain

2010-08-25T22:28:00.000-07:00

In my manuscript Ghost Coast, I have a character named Byron who loves poetry, although ironically he's not fond of poetry by Lord Byron. (His favorite poet is Walt Whitman.) He recites a poem he uses for meditation. I researched a lot of poetry, wanting something meditative, filled with images of nature, which would fit Byron's personality as a Wiccan. I read on Pravs World, "life is a mountain," and I thought, "No, each day is a mountain." I probably read that somewhere, it doesn't sound original; however, this poem just flowed out from that thought, so fast that I had to write it quickly, like sopping up spilled wine. I paid no attention to rhythm and little to rhyme, although the ABCB rhyme scheme kicked in naturally. It just flowed out of my soul. That's the sort of poem my guy Byron would write. I thought I'd share it with my friends, since so many of you are climbing your own personal mountains.

EACH DAY IS A MOUNTAIN
by Robyn Ann McKenzie

Each day is a mountain.
I climb it alone.
I climb ever upward
Struggling to find home.

One mountain is Hope,
The other Despair,
One is the Pain
I silently bear.

With each step up the trail
I grow stronger each day.
My soul guides me forward,
My heart knows the way.

Some of the paths are well-trodden,
Others I wander with no guide.
I don’t always know what I seek,
Only that I can’t ever hide.

Each step is a promise
I make to my soul,
Never to stop climbing
To my unreachable goal.

In silent meditation
I struggle each day.
My soul guides me forward,
My heart knows the way.

(Yes, this is my own work. Please don't steal it. Thanks, friends! Keep on climbing.)

Trimming the Word Count

2010-06-21T13:37:00.000-07:00

You've written what you know is the next bestseller. It took months, maybe years, but at last it's done. As you prepare to submit it, you finally check the word count.

250,000 words!

What the...! When? How? It didn't feel like that much writing!

If you're reading this, you likely googled for help on this issue. If you're a casual writer wondering what's the deal with word counts, let me quickly define some things.

Short story - under 7,500 words
Novelette - 7,500 - 17,500 words
Novella - 17,500 - 40,000 words
Novel - 40,000 words and above

Word counts are important in contests. NaNoWriMo requires a minimum of 50,000 words. Some have a cap, a short story no longer than 5,000 words. Likely, the judges have many entries to read and don't want to be bogged down, or a minimum of space to publish your story in a magazine, thus a cap to keep within that space.

I'll be dealing with novels, but short stories can take similar advice.

How Much Is Too Much

The big question, one highly debated. People will argue with me. I encourage it. I win debates!

First time novelists should never submit anything over 100,000 words, and even that is pushing it. The ideal length for a new writer is 50,000 to 80,000. Why? More pages means more money in printing fees, and you're not worth the expense. Sorry, that's the harsh truth. Publish a few smaller works, gain fame, try again.

The general rule is, with the exception of big-name authors, no novel should be over 120,000 words. Murder/mystery books should be no more than 80,000, while science fiction and fantasy can push that limit to 150,000 words, if you're well-established.

That's important. It doesn't matter if you've been writing for your school newspaper since sixth grade, if you have no money behind your name, don't aim for a novel to shame Victor Hugo and Leo Tolstoy. When you're Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, you can write 200,000 words and publishers will still kowtow before you. When you're John Smith, no fan base besides your classmates and parents, no assurance that even your aunt will buy the book, an editor will much rather take a gamble on something small. People don't want 700-page tomes, they want a cheap paperback they can take on the bus. That's what sells. This is a business, it's all about money to them. Save your magnum opus for after you have a few thousand fans on Facebook.

You're probably tempted to check your novel again right now. Go ahead....

Now that you've cringed, as I first did when I realized my novel was 170,000 words, it's time to consider your options.

1. Shelve it. Try a new, smaller story.
2. Split it in half and aim for a sequel.
3. Edit the hell outta that thing.

Finish At Your Own Pace

Before I begin, a writer shouldn't worry about word counts while in the creative process. Let the story flow. Do not look at the word counter. Whether you finish at a mere 40,000 words or over 150,000, let the story finish naturally.

This is what I do. Many people will shovel you advice, and many will say I'm wrong, but this works for me. After I punch in the final period, I immediately go back to page one and do a top-to-bottom read-through. The story is in my head, so I can see if I captured the spirit of it. While enjoying your story, go ahead and fix mundane things: punctuation, grammar, spelling, scenes that just didn't turn out right. Again, don't worry about the word count yet. Make sure this is truly how you want your story to sound. You'd be surprised how often scenes in retrospect are pure crap, or whole conversations of dialog sound stupid.

Once you have a completed manuscript, put that sucker away. Don't look at it. Don't proofread it. Don't dwell on it. Divorce yourself from that project. Start a new story, or proofread another manuscript gathering dust. Don't think, "But I wanted to publish it before the end of the year." SHELVE IT! Give yourself time to become detached. Trust me, you want no feelings for this story, because the next part will be brutal.

After six months have passed and you can hardly remember the names of your characters, now you can open your file to a story you hardly know. If you haven't already, this is the time to set it up as if you're going to send it to the editor: 8.5" by 11" page, one inch margins, 12-point font Courier New, double spaced, and a header with Last Name / Title / Page Number (use Insert/Fields to make it uniform).

If you're like me, double spacing it will be a shocker. That sweet novel suddenly explodes. But guess what: if it's on your computer at 1,000 pages, it'll arrive at the editors desk at 1,000 pages, and the second thing an editor looks at (the first being your title page with your name and your agent's name) is a word count or the number of pages. It's good to put the word count on the title page, just under your address, that way it saves them from flipping to the end.

Quantity over quality? No, it's just that, unless their eyes light up with dollar signs simply hearing your name and the prospect of another Hawaiian trip...er, I mean, best-selling novel...when an editor sees 1,000 pages, they think "oh gods not another prolix rookie" and toss it aside. Maybe it really is good, but it's too long to publish.

Try Again

Do not be ashamed if your first attempt at a novel turns into War and Peace. It's likely your story really is good, but it's two novels in one, or you have too many extraneous scenes. Don't wallow in worries. That was a good first try. It was practice. Now, let's go at it for real.

Now that you're acquainted with the writing process, first, set your document settings as if ready for the editor's desk, Courier New 12-point font and double spaced. This time, as you write, you'll know how long your story really is. My very first novel, I went through and added almost a hundred pages to it, thinking it looked too short. Later, after learning about word counts, I checked. Yikes! That hundred pages put it way over the limit. I decided it was easier to move on. I can edit it back down at my own pace, but I have more stories to tell.

Sequel?

When faced with a behemoth story, first see if you can break it into a sequel. Sequels are not good for first-time novelists (again, an editor has no clue if your book will sell, so why commit to two books?) If you've proven you can write quality stuff that sells, then having the assurance that there will be another novel in six months can be a good thing. This might mean rewriting scenes and inventing a new climax in the middle of the present story.

If you can end Book One nicely and pitch it as a stand-alone, while secretly keeping Book Two to spring upon them after the money comes pouring in, all the better. If not, see if the editor is looking for a series, be clear that this is the first in that series, and make an intense cliffhanger that forces a reader to want Book Two.

Chop-chop, Snip-snip

Let's say it's not actually 2 books in one, it's simply too long. This is where it gets bloody, and where divorcing yourself from the project becomes vital. It's time to slaughter that beast.

Tithing

Here's something I read recently, and I plan on trying it someday. First, cut the chapters by 10%. Let's say you have 50 chapters. Find five that are unnecessary. A little voice in your head will scream, "No! They're all necessary!" Ignore that voice. This is why you must not feel attachment, but maintain the cold calculation of a serial killer. That scene of the protagonist at a party where she meets an old friend who we never see again... not needed! That long bit of dialog where John and Jane talk about the weather, unless it's foreshadowing the storm that will wipe out their hometown, it's probably not needed. If it has been established that the main character is passive until someone insults his hair, and then he goes into a homicidal rage, showing him attacking a man who just made such an insult might not be necessary. Showing the insult, a flash in the protag's eyes, and then cutting to Protag entering his apartment and Roomie shocked that he's covered in blood is more powerful.

Now that 10% of the chapters are gone, do the same to each chapter. 10 pages to the chapter? Trim it to nine. It's not that hard, really. A word here or there, a shorter word when a long word isn't needed, getting orphaned words back up with the rest of their paragraph...poof! Congratulations, your 50-chapter book, 10 pages each, thus 500-page novel just became 45 chapters at 9 pages, so 405 pages. That's 95 pages of fluff cleaned out.

Psych Yourself

Too scared to start hacking at this stuff? I have a psychological trick.

What makes most writers reluctant to chop scenes is the love, diligence, and imagination we put into it. So convince yourself you're not tossing that hour of writing into oblivion.

I got into a habit of keeping my major edits in a separate file, Title-outtakes.doc. Copy and paste your scenes in there. I also add why the scene doesn't work, because sometimes I'll ready through those out-takes and think "But that was a really great bit of dialog!" Yes, it was, but circumstances changed and you can't use it now. Convince yourself that those deleted scenes could form the basis of a whole new book. It's all psychological comforting.

Dieting Your Book

Let's say you're not faced with trimming War and Peace down to Animal Farm. You just need to trim off 5,000 words.

Here are some tricks:

1) Simple Shortening

This is where you do minor tightening. You can do word searches for these things. My favorite is going to be. Search the document for that phrase.

"This is going to be great." Shorter! "This will be great."
"It was going to be an easy task." Shorter! "The task would be easy."

Contractions are a prolix writer's best friend. Dialog is naturally peppered with them. People also don't speak in complete sentences. "Wanna go to the store?" instead of "John, would you like to go to the store with me later this evening?" Don't go too crazy. There are times when using contractions is not good.

Dialog should flow naturally, but don't give your characters the same word whiskers that plague public speakers. "Like," "you know," "well," "okay," "oh," and the dreaded "um" can give reality to your characters, showing shock, nervousness, temerity, and other emotions (show, not tell, remember?) However, if used in excess, it'll make them and you sound dumb. When trying to edit for less, see if you can cut them out without influencing the character.

Remember, your audience isn't dumb. Saying "green grass" and "blue sky" is unneeded unless the grass has been yellow all summer until the storm passes, or the sky has been gray until that one glorious day.

Beware of repeating terms. Using a single word repetitively in a sentence can be tedious, not to mention it looks juvenile. Editors will naturally catch this error, but...isn't it best to catch it first?

Word search "seem." It either is, or it isn't. Rarely does it "seem."

"It seemed to last a long time" is fine, if it really didn't.
"It seems to be raining." Well, it is? If it is, don't say it seems to be!

Word search for "just." Just is the um of writing. Just to let you know, just because you can use it and it just sounds right, it just isn't needed all the time. "In just three minutes" can be "In three minutes." Unless you're an infomercial announcer!

Word search for "which." Sometimes, "which" is necessary, but we tend to use it in unnecessary ways.

"Her birthday, which would be in just two days from now, was a party which I have been looking forward to all summer." - 23 words
"All summer, I've anxiously awaited her birthday, now two days away." - 10 words

Look at that! Cut that awkward sentence in half! Call me Jet Li.

2) Unnecessary Description

English teachers, cover your ears!

The sad fact is, as writers, we can lose ourselves in adjectives. Mister Protag brings Love Interest a bouquet. Is it really vital to the story that it was a dozen pink and yellow roses, each bud tightly curled, as if holding within its petals the hopes of all his dreams, and each glistening, verdant leaf a testament to his adoration of her emerald eyes? Or... is it just a bouquet?

Description is important to good storytelling. If that bouquet truly does represent his love for her, by all means, delve into the symbolism! But does the vase she puts it in also convey meaning? It can, if she hates him and puts that gorgeous bouquet in a cracked vase still dirty from the last bouquet he brought. Otherwise, it's just a vase. What about the table she put it on? Is it vital to know it's a plastic table she bought at Ikea the week before when she and her best friend were shopping for shelves? What about when your character stepped into the bathroom at the bar, and those five pages of describing every bit of graffiti on the wall, is that vital to your story? What about the crystal wine goblet etched with a galleon at full sail, is that glass so special it deserves such detail? Sorry, bar bathroom, but you're simply a room to piss in. Sorry, wine goblet, but she'll sip you once, set you down, and we'll forget you and your galleon in two paragraphs.

3) Unnecessary Phrases

Sometimes, we use phrases to sound important, when really we're fluffing out an idea. Lawyers and politicians do this by habit, usually to confuse others, muffle up their arguments, and make their case sound more legitimate. Maybe it works on dumb people, but smart people will be wary of writing filled with these terms. You sound like a politician, and really, who trusts politicians? Beware of these terms:

All things considered
As a matter of fact
As far as I'm concerned
At the present time
Because of (or "due to" or "by virtue of") the fact that... (simply "because" or "since" can work)
By means of ("through" is better)
For all intents and purposes (you might want to make sure you didn't word it "intensive purposes" too)
Has a tendency to (just "tends to")
In a manner of speaking
In a very real sense
In my opinion
In the case of
It seems that (remember above, bad uses of "seem")
The point I'm trying to make (obviously you've used too many words to make your point)
Type of ("It's the type of policy that seems to make voters wary" can be "Such policy makes voters wary")
What I mean to say is (unless the muttering character has just spent a paragraph rambling aimlessly, in which case, you might want to delete that scene anyway)

4) Unnecessary Prepositions

This won't make much of a dint, but it's worth a shot.

This isn't just prepositions at the end of sentences ("That's where it's at" which should be "That's where it is" ...no at). I'm talking prepositions that simply should not be in a sentence. We're all guilty of it.

A boss may intone, "Work outside of the box." A hand will pop up in the back. "Ma'am, don't you mean 'work outside the box'?" The boss snaps, "That's what I said!"

Inside of, outside of, off of... keep listing them.

"She jumped off of the swing" should be "She jumped off the swing."

Like I said, it's minimal, maybe you'll trim 50 words, but every bit helps.

On the subject of prepositions, don't be fooled into believing sentences NEVER end with prepositions. Grammatically, they can. Latin doesn't, but that's Latin. Pedantic plebeians will teach that English should be exactly the same as Latin in all of its rules (including raving about the infamous "to boldly go" phrase). Sorry, elitist snobs, but English is a German-based language that happens to have some Latin-inspired words in our dictionary placed there by the French.

My favorite example, consider these verbs:
to put
to put up
to put up with
All three mean very different things.

Two friends are talking.
1) "I have to put up with this crap all day."
2) "Well, it's just something with which you'll have to put up."
What the...? Do people really talk like that? Some do. Some were lambasted by a middle school teacher, humiliated in front of peers, forced to stand in a corner wearing the dunce cap for writing prepositions at the end of their sentences. I pity those people.

Seriously, if you smell dog crap, do you yell, "On what did I step?"
Hell no! You yell, "What did I step on?"

"To step on" is called a verb phrase. Learn it. Love it. It's something you'll have to boldly put up with!

5) Unintense intensifiers

Some intensifiers don't empower our writing. "Really, very, quite, severely, extremely"... they don't cut it, so cut it! (and yes, "unintense" is not a real word, so sue me!)

"It really is important that you come into work on time today because we've been very busy, extremely packed, and we're severely understaffed, so we're quite overwhelmed." - 27 words

An angry boss (unless she's a don't-stop-for-a-breath motormouth) is more likely to take the Hemingway approach

"We're busy. It's packed. We're understaffed and overwhelmed. Come into work NOW!" - 12 words

6) Cliches and Euphemisms

You're nitpicking now, so you might as well search your work for these. Cliches make your work sound trite. Unfortunately, there are so many cliches and euphemisms out there, it's nigh impossible to list them all. Read through some at:
http://www.gardendigest.com/cliche.htm

7) Expletive Constructions

These little buggers are the termites of writing. "It is/was" and "There is/are" at the beginning of sentences weaken anything that come after them. Terminate the pests!

My suggestion: word search again, this time using the "match case" option. Find all instances of "It is/was" and "There is/are" at the beginning of sentences, and rewrite them into something stronger.

"There are many fish living in the sea." - soggy, like a 6th grader's biology essay.
"Many fish live in the sea." - more concise, crisper, like fried calamari.

Once you finish this, click off the "match case" option and search all such instances. Look at how to strengthen and shorten those sentences, ridding yourself of that horrible passive voice. For one, you're not reading the story as a flowing river, but as individual sentences, separate entities. Many novelists have a hard time examining their manuscript line by line, so this helps. I've trimmed hundreds of words off a manuscript using this suggestion alone!

8) Use the active voice.

This naturally follows extermination of expletive constructions.

This is straight out of Strunk and White. If you have not read Elements of Style, do so. Seriously! That book and Stephen King's On Writing should be considered mandatory for any aspiring writer.

Not only will this make your writing more powerful, it will often shorten your sentences and cut out fluff. Fluff is bad. Fluff is the habit we picked up when our high school teacher assigned a five-page essay on the French Revolution, due Friday. Fluff will make you sound like you're still in high school hating that teacher.

"It was not long before he was very sorry that he had said what he said." - 16 words

There's nothing wrong with this sentence, but it's long, awkward, and conveys little. You can give the same meaning with five words.

"He soon repented his words."

Now, I'm not one for E-Prime, but many "to be" verbs lead into passive tenses. "She is hurt" is perfectly fine, but "They were dancing all night" is passive voice. "Were dancing" can also be "danced." Sometimes passive is fine, such as for a timid character. Often it's not. Excessive passive voice bogs a reader down. That reader includes your editor. If he feels bogged, your manuscript gets tossed.

9) Omit needless words!

Again, right out of Elements, and this will be my final suggestion. After all, "needless" could mean half your novel. It all depends on your talent. (Ain't I brutal!)

Seriously, what are needless words? Pleonasms, phrases that repeat themselves. "I saw it with my own eyes" is a good example. So is "fly through the air." What, not through Jello?

"A total of [number] [items]" can be only the number and the items.

"Scarlet red," "azure blue," "pale white," "tediously boring," "strangely odd." Notice these couplets mean the exact same thing. We see and hear these all the time, and some terms have wormed into acceptance. "Foreign imports," for example. Sorry, I've never heard of domestic imports.

Redundancies have plagued the English language since the Normans and Saxons tried to blend their languages, often resorting to a Norman term juxtaposed with a Saxon term, just to make sure the meaning was understood. "Aid and abet" and "cease and desist" are notorious examples.

Sometimes, we repeat a word without realizing it, such as ATM machine. The "M" means machine. Chai tea is another common one. Chai means tea.

These are some of my biggest redundancies. Again, these terms are not by themselves bad. Professional documents are filled with them. Using them will not spell death to your novel. However, if your goal is to tighten the belt of your fat manuscript, doing word searches might help shave off a few words.

For the complete list, see here:

absolutely necessary
actual fact
armed gunman
ask the question
basic necessities
blend together
blue (or any hue) in color
bouquet of flowers (either specify or say just bouquet)
burning embers
cacophony of sound
circle around
close proximity
closed fist (I laugh at this one. What, praytell, is an open fist?)
completely... (just search that word. Completely filled, completely eliminated, completely dead... unless he's "mostly dead." Sorry, couldn't help a little Princess Bride reference)
could possibly
descend down (also raise up)
disappear from sight
during the course of (just "during" is fine)
dwindle down (you can't go up)
each and every
enter in (and exit out)
exact same
final outcome
frozen ice (and burning fire)
kneel down
lag behind
lift up (and lower down)
may/might possibly
mental telepathy
new beginning
pair of twins
palm of the hand (unless your foot has a palm. Mine doesn't.)
past history
pick and choose
pouring down
proceed ahead
protest against
repeat again
sudden impulse
twelve noon
unexpected surprise
usual custom
very unique
white snow

Sorry this post is long

Hopefully by now your novel is a bit thinner. If you do all of this and still have a monster on your hands, perhaps you really should consider if this is two stories in one. There is no shame in taking the romance between the main character and the murder victim out and making that into a completely different story.

Whatever advice people give, either biting or gentle, listen seriously to it. You might think that chapter flashing back to the villain's childhood is vital to knowing his character, but maybe others can figure out his personality without that massive, boring chunk. It's not easy to take our darling creation and shred it to bits, but that's part of the creative writing process.

Have friends read your story, and challenge them to be brutally honest about what parts bored them. Better yet, have other writers read it, since they know what to look for and will be less cautious about hurting your feelings than a friend. Some will be more than willing to give a scathing review and red-mark that thing to bits. I'm that sort. I would be your worst nightmare if I ever became an editor. However, that's the type of editing I want: brutal, honest, tear out the rot and hand it back raw, pink, ready to be healed and become stronger from the scars. I don't want happy, sappy, omg-it's-so-great fluffery. Gawd, I hated professors who believed in writing only what was good about a story and never giving negative input. I want to know what's bad so I can fix it! Writers should take on that mentality. Don't fear criticism. Crave it!

Beat out the fluff. Keep concise.
Happy writing!

He Never Ran

2010-05-31T18:37:00.000-07:00

I heard a newsclip about lightning canceling Obama's Memorial Day speech, and I thought up this poem in about five minutes.
---

The rain begins in the cemetery
And lighting flashes over Chicago.
Even the President is hurried away
Urging others to carefully go.

But he stays.

It doesn’t matter what his name is.
Once, he was a serial number in a cell far away.
Sitting in his wheelchair, some offer to push him
While others scurry and run away.

He never ran.

Not then, not now,
He never ran when the flashing in the sky
Was something far more deadly than lightning.
He stayed, lost his leg, shocked each time that he didn’t die.

Some saw danger and fled.
Most still ended up dead.

Another man comes up to him and warns him he should leave.
“It’s dangerous with the lightning and you in this chair.”
The veteran just laughs, a creaky, sagely sound.
“Sorry sonny, but you had to have been there.”

What did he know of danger,
This plumped and spoiled stranger?

He never ran away from his buddies,
Not on the battlefield, and not by their grave.
He stays to remember the pranks they played in boot camp.
He stays to remember the sacrifice they gave.

He chuckles to himself while others run with umbrellas.
He remembers the lightning storm in that land far away,
An open field, more metal on him then than this wheelchair,
And they had considered that to be a good day!

The rain soaks his white hair as he salutes.
“I never ran, my friends.
And because I didn’t run, I’ll never run again,
And true, the pain never ends.

But that’s okay.

I can sit in this wheelchair, sit in this rain,
While others flee the storm, and I can
Tell all of you heroes quite proudly:
I never ran!”

So You Wanna Be a Writer

2010-04-19T15:19:00.000-07:00

Just thought I'd share a response to this article:
http://bit.ly/bRaViv
---

I've heard this advice many times. Matt likes to daydream about a day when I'm richer than JK Rowling. I'll be happy to get published and sell enough to break even.

The advice of writing every day is absolutely true. This is what NaNoWriMo is all about. "So, you want to be a writer? Fine, spend one month as a writer. If you can hack it and produce a 50,000 word novel, maybe you've got something." Most of the writers I've met for Nanowrimo feel beaten and exhausted at the end of the month. They're GLAD when they can stop writing and declare they don't want to touch a keyboard again. It's not a profession for them. For me, I almost always go for double, 100k words in 30 days. That's giving me a REAL challenge. If my computer is out and I can't write all day, I feel lost.

I don't write because I want to be a writer. I write because I can't imagine anything else I'd rather be doing. Whether I publish it, whether it sells, whether it gets good reviews... sure, part of me cares about that, but the important thing is to get that story out of me and sculpt it into something I like. That's why I prefer fiction. It's a story I WANT to tell, not one I feel I have to in order to get paid. That's like literary prostitution! The only time I don't write is when the seizures turn my brain into stir fry. Otherwise, I'm writing daily, or like now, editing until my brain hurts.

I used to hate editing for many of the reasons stated in this article. I would spend hours researching a scene, or looking for the right word, just to discover the entire chapter was crap. I've recently dealt myself such a devastating blow--two days of researching a description, and as I was proofreading I began to yawn. Totally boring part, did nothing to enhance my character, I wanted to skip it and go to the part I knew was exciting. Two days of research! It might work good for an article on Celtic armory, but it has no place in my story.

Every major novel I write has a file purely of "take-outs," scenes I loved at the time, and maybe they'll work somewhere else, but I had to get rid of them in order to find my literary David hidden in the lump of marble logorrhea. It hurts to edit. It's masochistic! It's one more element which makes the argument that all writers are secretly sociopaths.

However, I disagree with his opinion on "inspiration" being untrustworthy and something not to seek out. For one, I've yet to figure out how anyone "seeks" inspiration, except through Absinthe and drugs. True, some great classics came out of those altered states, but so did a lot of freakishly BAD writing.

Those who believe they can write purely on inspiration are fools. Still, there are times when I get inspired, write like a madwoman for days or weeks, foregoing sleep, and turn out something that makes me think "where the hell did THAT come from? That can't be me. It's GOOD!" And there are days when what I produce makes my stomach turn. Yesterday's sheer brilliance is today's shudder of horror. Time to hit the delete button and pretend that never happened.

Often, inspiration comes in bursts. I'll write for 2-3 hours a day, and maybe for 10 minutes I'll get a flow of words that clicks. A well-placed joke, a witty remark, a paragraph of description that leaves me stunned. Usually, I have to wait days, if not weeks, for any drive to write at all. That's the time for masochistic editing.

Inspiration is not always bad. It's just not always good, and holding on to those pages purely because they were "inspired" shows immaturity. Writers who think "inspiration"--mere episodes of prolix paroxysms--are Muse-inspired brilliance have obviously not realized that Muses hand out rocks, not pearls. A writer's job is to take that rock, cut it, polish it, and hope and pray there's a gem inside and not just mud.

Kaleidoscope of Sound

2009-10-18T15:33:00.000-07:00

Autumn to me is a symphony.

I find it strange that some people don't see colors with sounds, or sounds with colors. I hate wearing red, orange, or yellow because it annoys my ears. Similarly, some music makes my eyes hurt.

Seeing the American flag makes me hear chaos. The red and white stripes are alternating screams and bombs, or sometimes fires and silence, or a trill of noise that resembles a machine gun. The blue field is a soothing, drowning melody like a cello upon which five-pointed grenades explode. Or again, white is sometimes silence, not good silence, but death silence, in which case those stars are dead breve rests. If I look at the flag quickly, particularly if it is hanging vertical, I hear a battle. I doubt the Founding Fathers took that into consideration.

Christmas red and green is both annoying and soothing. Much like the holiday, I suppose.

Through high school, I wore black because it was a droning sound, the closest to silence I could get. White was sometimes silent, sometimes the loudest, like an Ace in a deck of cards. I accented my dark ensemble with purple or blue, because it was soft enough to speak while not screaming.

Have you ever told someone they were wearing a "loud shirt"? That can be literal to me.
But the reverse can also be true. Sounds can evoke colors.

Music is a kaleidoscope of sound. When I was a child, I always wanted to play piccolo (long story why). When I learned flute and finally got my chance to be first-chair and thus the piccolo player, I couldn't stand the noisy stick. It was too bright! It was the brightest red, hot pink even, neon and burning. Even the flute was becoming too bright. I switched to low brass. The music of the low instruments is made of shades of blue and purple. I prefer my world in those colors. I tried trumpet, and that was yellowish orange. French horn is the highest I can handle now. It's green, although it can range to blue and into yellow.

Not just the timbre of the instrument, but the notes themselves can affect the color. My trombone can be indigo, but it can also become lemon yellow, even cherry red if I'm playing particularly loud. Flutes can drift along in a greenish-blue sea, but rarely do they get to purple. Percussion are like white dots that brighten an otherwise monochrome tapestry. I have to be careful when playing in band because I can get lost in the visual aspect of the song.

It's a neurological condition called synesthesia. It's not pathological, I'm not crazy (really!) In fact, I love it this way. I hear music everywhere. I see colors when I hear sounds. Who needs drugs!

I don't literally "see" every single sound or "hear" every color, but... does it make sense to say I "feel" them? I know, I know, now I'm mixing three sensory experiences at once. "Impressions" might be a better word. I currently hear a bird singing out my window. It sings low, green, then goes into a high red and yellow trill, then warbles again in the green hues. Yet I don't see those colors on my computer screen as I type this. They're in my head, not in my eyes.

Perhaps because I can control it to some extent. I think being in the school band helped me to learn when to let my brain see the sounds, and when to keep it to just impressions. Some songs are still "orangish-red with white clashes" while others are "lavender with teal waves." Listening to ambient music is best for leaning back, closing my eyes, and allowing the colors to ripple on the canvas of my mind. In those moments, yes, I do see colors because I allow myself to. I have a hard time imagining the world any other way.

Now the trees are changing color. The gentle green melody is giving a triumphant fanfare, loud, boisterous, glorious, before the dirge of grayish white winter sweeps in and murmurs like a crowd in a church. Taking a long walk, I think, "Who needs an iPod!" I hear plenty of songs around me. Each yellow, orange, and red leaf is a player in this symphony that makes up Nature.

Music adds color to my world. Colors sing to me.

Modern Fantasy: A Genre in Need of a Diet

2009-10-03T02:36:00.000-07:00

In response to this blunt and brutal blog about my favorite genre:

http://www.spikemagazine.com/1002fantasydiet.php

As a fantasy writer, this has really been an eye-opening examination of the genre I love. It's true, I grew up thinking these pulp writers were gods of the genre, until I began reading the old tales. How could some court balladeer capture the imagination in a song that might have taken 2-3 hours to sing, when modern writers strive for the same thing, take 5-10 books to deliver their story, and never achieve the same goal?

Perhaps they feel the modern audience can't imagine "their world;" therefore, they must delve into the intricacies they've invented in their heads for true understanding to be gained. Tolkien wrote the Silmarilian as a project saga, then mentioned the deeds stated there throughout the Lord of the Rings. But a reader doesn't have to know Silmarilian to enjoy LOTR. Modern fantasy writers should take note.

I admit, I am just as guilty. I have my 12-book-long sci-fi that I'm still tweaking. But since that is a multi-generational story, I switch up main characters every two books, and sometimes shift planets so that the reader doesn't get bogged down (or so I hope). But particularly in high fantasy stories, I have caught myself on many occasions going on lengthy tangents about obscure religions of my fantasy world that are not in any way pertinent to the plot. It's simply a tidbit I invented and thought was interesting; therefore, I feel I have the right to drag the reader through a full page of useless invention, because it's my story and I think it's important, so nya!

Mr. Burns, my high school English teacher my Junior and Senior years, told me I wrote like Charles Dickens, in that I go on tangents all the time. 12 years later, I'm still uncertain if that was a compliment or a critique. A harsh professor in college lambasted my wandering ways. I try to keep on subject now. It's not easy. Being inundated by epic series, seeing full shelves of dragon lore and fairy tales and Wiccan rants, makes a writer want the same.

We want our own shelf in Barnes and Noble, dagnabbit!

In a world where quality-equals-quantity, writers are even encouraged to take their simple story and write sequels to death. I blame Hollywood for that, more than this blog's insistence that it was Tolkien's fault. Tolkien meant for LOTR to be one story, a single saga of epic size, a modern Song of Roland or Völsunga.

His publisher probably wanted more money.

Lair of Fair Hair

2009-09-29T01:20:00.000-07:00

56 inches.

No, that's not how tall I am. That's how long my hair is.

My hair is not "long" (defined as a few inches past the shoulders) nor "very long" (defined as below the waist), but it is considered "extremely long," i.e. it is to my knees, maybe a little past that. My last serious haircut (because everyone asks) was the summer of 1995. Since then, it has only been trims whenever I feel the split ends have taken over my head.

Let's get this straight: kids may call me Rapunzel in the supermarket, but I do not have magical hair. It tangles, it splits, it tends to frizz, especially at the beach. I sit on it. I've stepped on it and did a not-so-graceful tumble. I've closed it in the car door (but not an elevator door yet; I get asked that too). It catches on doorknobs or in the door itself and yanks me backwards after I'm already two steps away, and yes, I've fallen on my keister because of that. Kids sneak up behind me and pull it, then run away giggling. My kitty has attached himself to my bum in his attempt to attack it. I once leaned over while vacuuming, had a bunch to fall and get sucked into the canister area, and instantly lost eight inches. Surprisingly, it did not pull at my scalp. It simply ripped.

Basic facts: my hair is brown. I was born blonde, went red when I was 9, and from there it's been getting darker.

History of Hair: It was the 80s. Yes, I did the perm thing. Yes, it looked hideous. That is why you will never see pictures of me from between the years 1987 and 1991. Trust me, it was bad. A few times, I used "Sun In" to lighten my hair, especially when I was transforming into a redhead. I wanted to be blonde again. It seriously killed the hair of both me and my little sister. Nasty stuff!

The only time I dyed my hair was 1997, my senior year of high school. My hair was going red again, so I wanted to try something darker. It was my mother's suggestion to go with "blue-black" hair. Hey, if Mom gives you permission, you go for it! That's all been cut out by now. My hair is "virgin hair," not treated, a nonsmoking environment (except when my upstairs neighbor throws his cigarettes into our planter), no dyed parts left, not permed or anything, I can't stand blow dryers, blah blah.

Why all this about my hair? I'm bored, sue me!

Actually, I had an intriguing interview regarding my hair recently, what inspired me to grow it, what I do with it, how I care for it, and a bunch of such questions, some which I'm asked every frickin' day.

And yes, I am sick of it, so why start your question with "I know you're probably sick of being asked this, but..." Other questions in the interview made me ponder why no one asks more intriguing questions besides "how long does it take to dry." Mein Gott! I am asked that constantly! It's to the point where someone says "Wow, you have lovely hair," and I reply with a snappy, "Three hours! Okay? It takes three hours to dry. No blow dryer. If I braid it wet, it won't dry. Ever! Otherwise, 3 hours!!!"

Honestly, I don't think about "hair care" too often. Lathe, wash, rinse, repeat, you know the drill. But I did some homework after that interview to see if I'm using something that will kill my hair in 20 years. Maybe because I had a time in middle school where my hair was falling out so bad, I actually developed a shiny bald spot the size of a silver dollar, so I'm a tad concerned if something is going to destroy my hair like that. Back then, the solution was simple: use baby shampoo and something that looked like bug tar. Yuck! Nowadays, I got into the habit of buying whatever is at the Dollar Tree. It's cheap, but who cares, right?

Turns out Dollar Tree stuff ain't half bad! White Rain conditioners are "cone free;" they do not use silicone which "glues" your split ends together only to destroy your entire hair shaft in the long run. I also buy VO5 Naturals, which is on the "good" list.

Bad news: the White Rain Naturals Lavender Vanilla Shampoo I use apparently sucks in too many ways to list. For one, it has Ammonium Lauryl Sulfate (not the dreaded carcinogenic Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, but possibly just as bad, it's on the "no-no" ingredients list) plus likely half a dozen other irritant chemicals that I didn't bother to research after seeing that one. That might explain why I sometimes break out in a short-lived rash after showering. It also leaves my hair a bit dry if I wash it too frequently (once or twice a week is usually all I do). Well, it's cheap and it gets my hair clean, but maybe I'll splurge just a little.

One website suggested Kenra Moisturizing Shampoo. That runs $10-18/10oz bottle, depending on where you get it. Another was Monoi Shampoo, which has the "gentler" Sodium Laureth Sulfate (as opposed to "lauryl"). Price: $7-9/7.8oz bottle. Last suggestion I saw was the sulfate-free Back to Basics Blue Lavender Color Protecting Shampoo. At $10/11.5oz bottle, with the 33oz bottle going for $18. That might be my best deal... and it's my favorite LAVENDER!!!

Who am I kidding! I'll still buy from Dollar Tree.

Hair care:

1) rosewood boar bristle brush for daily use;
2) a plastic "worst thing in the world for your hair" brush if I need my hair quickly spot brushed and I don't have to worry about snagging;
3) a very long handled comb, meant for people with arthritis but it's awesome for brushing all the way down to the tip of my hair;
4) a jumbo hair claw, it holds my hair a little too tight, and plastic is rough-edged, but it's durable enough not to "slip" and big enough to hold all of my hair up in a bun;
5) a mega-size metal barrette of a butterfly. I get so many compliments about it, and it's the only clamp of its size on the planet known to actually fit ALL my thick hair at the nape of my neck, but only if it's dry and not twisted in a design;
6) my wrapped no-damage hair holders and variety of scrunchies;
7) a few small rhinestone barrettes if I want to get gussied up;
8) and my new favorite: handmade wooden hair sticks by the wonderful "Style Stix by Jayne" in the Portland Saturday Market. Big plug for her, since she is virtually unknown yet so awesomely affordable. The sticks were a birthday gift from my mother-in-law, custom ordered EXTRA long because Jayne's usual sticks would not go through all my hair. She was so nice to make these custom to my hair thickness, including a handmade cloth carrying case in iridescent black.

Yep, that's about it. Oh, and itty bitty tangle-free elastic bands that I only use if I'm doing tiny braids. Yeah... I told you, I'm not big on "hair care" or fancy hair products. What I have usually works, so that's what I have. Why do I need more? Not that I wouldn't mind some pretties for my hair, but I'm not big on that stuff.

So the interview I mentioned earlier had a bunch of other questions.

Who inspired you to grow your hair? A bad haircut did, combined with a teacher who "complimented" me that I was such an average, unassuming person, with average height, average weight, average hair, etc. That's not what you tell a 16-year-old trying to discover some individuality. So since I couldn't change the rest of me without getting plump or stretching on Wonka's taffy puller, I opted for "different" hair.

How do you wear your hair to bed? Depends on how tired I am. Sometimes it's loose, sometimes it's in a braid, both bug me in different ways. Loose and my husband rolls on top of it, braided and it hurts my neck. My little splurge was getting satin pillow cases to stop morning tangles. [Edit] In response to the commenter below, sleeping with a ponytail is actually really bad for your hair. It can cause horrible knots and breaks.

How long do you want to grow your hair? It's at my knees. That's good for now. I'll keep it there until that 8 inches that I lost in the vacuum cleaner catches up. After that, I'm curious how long it will get.

Do people compliment you or ridicule you? Both. I get stopped every time I go out with my hair down, so if I'm in a rush, it pays to spend a little time to twist it into a fast bun and use my plastic claw from hell. Once in a blue moon, I get the meth freak screaming at me that I'm Jezebel and I'm denying cancer children their wigs. Okay meth lady, try actually reading Locks of Love's website. They don't give to cancer kids. They give to children who will NEVER grow back their hair. Other NPOs do (Pantene for one). If I like my hair long, that's my choice, just like it was your choice to buy that crystal meth this morning. The difference is, it's not a crime to have long hair, so get over it and put down the knife.

Only once has anyone actually pulled a knife out and threatened to chop my hair, and that was my uncle... and no, he wasn't joking about doing it. I have a weird family.

There were other interesting questions that I'm too tired to recall, or the answers would be too long.

Instead, here's some interesting sites about living (and surviving) with long hair.

http://longhair.org/ - long hair club... join the club
http://www.rapunzelsdelight.com/ - pictures of insanely long hair and the designs you can make with it (I am determined to master the "sock bun")
http://www.longhaircommunity.com/ - everything to know about caring for your hair
http://the-light.com/mens/longhair.html - long hair for the laddies
http://www.savvyskin.com/shampoo-ingredients-to-avoid - watch what you buy
http://www.longhaircareforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=196051 - good cone-free conditioners (this sort of started my whole hair binge research thing)
http://www.tenderheaded.com/ - the combs here come highly recommended, I'll likely buy one soon
http://www.longlocks.com/ - great hair sticks... wish I could afford some of these
http://www.ficcare.com/ - fancy hair clamps, wish I could afford these too
http://beyondclassic.awardspace.us/choose.html - blog on hair, including commended products, an insane collection of hair goodies, and videos on designs good for knee-length hair. I still can't do a french twist with my hair, but she does.

Pantene Beautiful Lengths - If you are growing out your hair for donation, DO NOT use Locks of Love unless you are a child. They do not use adult hair at all, but sell it to other wig makers to cover administrative costs, or they simply toss it out if it has gray or damaged from color and heat treatments.

Do you want to know that those five years of diligent care and growth were used to pay some manager's Christmas bonus, or even THROWN OUT LIKE TRASH? They also charge the patient's family for the wigs. It's a sliding scale discount, but a good friend who's family dealt with Locks of Love said it still cost them hundreds of dollars just for one wig. Plus they don't give to cancer patients, nor do they claim to do so. Folks saw commercials of bald kids and assumed that they were chemo patients. Lock of Love never openly corrected the error, which I find despicable.

Okay, correction: they give wigs to a single form of cancer where basically chemo can never be stopped, therefore the child will never grow hair. That's the only one.

Yes, they do give to children with medical needs, but I would say 90% of the people donating to Locks of Love are doing so with the intent of helping cancer kids. I have met dozens of people who come up admiring my hair with stories of how they miss their long locks, but "It's all good, I donated them to Locks of Love after I lost my mother/sister/best friend/child to cancer. It'll go to a cancer kid." I cringe in pity, and I rarely tell them the truth because they look so happy about their good deed.

If you want your hair to go to ACTUAL CANCER PATIENTS, please consider using Pantene Beautiful Lengths.

Masochistic Reading

2009-09-22T17:55:00.000-07:00

When I'm feeling down and think I suck as a writer, I read some of the tripe on fanfiction.net and realize "at least I'm not like them."

For their credit, some of the short stories are amusing. Some are epic! Some would make amazing stories if only the writer had invented original characters instead of borrowing others (of course, then it wouldn't be "fan fiction"). And some really do get published. Have you seen how many shelves of Star Trek paperbacks are in Barnes and Noble?

Writing as a way to obsess over your favorite story can be a healthy way to experiment with styles without the pressure of deadlines. I've written fan fiction for Star Trek and Quantum Leap, usually as collaborations with my husband. It's not publish-quality, but it was fun.

Today was not a day to marvel at talented storytelling, but to convince myself "at least I'm not that bad." And I found my salvation. I will give the "writer" - and I use the term lightly - the grace of not linking to her story or mentioning her name. She is, sadly, one of many who post sordid excuses of fiction onto the internet every day. Her short story was so bad, I had to write about it so I would not obsess over it all day and let it ruin my own writing time.

Now, for truly wretched scrawling, no one can't get any worse than Tara Gilesbie's classic "My Immortal." Simply google "worst fanfiction" and you'll find it. It was deemed so bad that fanfiction.net, home of so much crap it makes dung beetles have aneurysms, finally pulled the story down from their server. Yet its utterly horrendous legacy lives on.
http://myimmortalrehost.webs.com/

[Warning: reading one paragraph will lower your IQ by ten points. You automatically forfeit your high school diploma and all university degrees if you finish all 40 chapters (and her definition of a "chapter" is one paragraph and a dozen lines of dialog). I once managed to read up to seven of those putrescent chapters before I got a huge headache and had to read some Dostoevsky to assure myself I was not in Purgatory. You have been warned.]

The story I read was not that bad. Still, it was quite awful. It was painfully apparent that this writer was maybe 13 with no understanding of even basic social skills. She must have received "inspiration" in what constitutes literature via text messaging her fellow 8th graders and by reading the aforementioned "My Immortal." She had a minimal grasp of the English language (I hope she was from another country... I really, really hope), and no sense of grammar at all, let alone spelling. I mean, seriously, spell-check exists even in this Note I'm writing. Use it!

It was also obvious that the writer used a thesaurus to sound intelligent while picking totally wrong words for the situation. "But dey is the loooongest words I find, so dey make me look more smart, so I dont care wat u says." I use thesauruses all the time when I just can't recall the word I need, but I at least have an idea of what I'm trying to say. Using unknown "heavy" words will likely make you sound less educated than keeping to one-to-two syllables.

To get your ideas across use small words, big ideas, and short sentences.
- John Henry Patterson

Let's not forget one of my favorite pet peeves: using twenty exclamation points does not mean the character screamed twenty times louder than a single exclamation point. Use up to three in emails and IM'ing if you think pounding Shift-1 helps to relieve stress, or use caps for shouting emphasis, but not in a story meant to be taken seriously.

Also, people do not literally say "LOL." They laugh. So type "She cackled viciously as she insulted him," and we all know what you mean, not "LOL... u is soooo stoopid." Honestly!

Language aside, the writer included a "flashback" repeating two lines of dialog that just occurred. I'm assuming she imagined that would be the commercial break, although it was in no way a climax or cliffhanger, nor a place where the studio would logically cut to show the writer's favorite Lucky Charms commercial.

One character wore a purple bikini, then suddenly had on a blue dress, then it was red in the next sentence, then she magically switched to tan pants. The male character also had polychromatic superpowers, as his eyes changed color too many times to decide which shade she intended.

Now, I've written stories where I accidentally changed a character's eyes from green to blue simply because I did not make a character profile, but this is "fan fiction." These are established characters. This particular story was about an anime, so it's drawn in color for the fan to observe and describe. Despite many magical things that happen in Japanese animation, this character does not have color-shifting eyes. They are blue. Not green, not brown, not purple, not golden. Blue.

My favorite lines:
1) Nothing pounds home a person's intent like emphasis, right? "She looked deeply into his deep green eyes that is as deep as the sea and so deeply intense it was like looking deep into a human soul's deepest heart." Now that's deep!
2) Just as confusing: "She blushed a deeper dimness of scarlet red." Dimness?
3) But nothing quite proves one is a talented writer as inventing unique ways of describing simple actions. "She vomited tears like crocodiles." That's certainly a revoltingly visual if I've ever read one.

The torment of reading this short fan fiction in no way inspired me out of my writer's block, but it did cheer me up. I now realize I am at least a fluent and well-trained writer. I can read the classics without resorting the Cliff Notes. I have assisted many other aspiring writers, using my grammar-nazi'ing obsession for good.

And I don't vomit tears!

Busy Week

2009-06-27T16:04:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm off to play a concert at Bridgeport Village tonight at 6pm. If you're in the Portland area, come on down and help stimulate the economy.

After the concert is over, Matt and I are scurrying over to Stub Stewart State Park for Field Day 2009. If you happen to be into amateur radio, listen in and try to find "W7OTV" out of the pure chaos as people around the world test out how to keep the lines of communication open during a state of emergency (solar power and generators, for our group). We like to take the night shift (except for the generator noise). So from 9pm to 11am, we'll be calling out "CQCQ" and talking to people around the world. I love bringing my camera and taking pictures right at sunrise, since the park is so amazingly picturesque. The radio operators are also funny to photograph at 5am.

Which means tomorrow we crash and sleep all day. I like that plan!

Monday is a special day. I'm fixing dinner for a lady in my band name Kristine who gave birth to a baby who will not survive long. In fact, she wasn't supposed to make it to birth, but by a pure miracle little Leah Grace has lived three months.

Please read her story here, but have the tissues ready:
http://www.tigardtimes.com/news/story.php?story_id=124408039674470200

It's a joy and agony to Kristine and her husband, holding their child and never knowing when her time will be up. Her church and our band joined forces to fix dinners and pitch in donations for house-cleaners to help the family. We have no money, but I sure can cook! I'm going to make my special parmesan-chicken-ranch-basil-pasta-casserole thing (I have not come up with a name for it yet). Matt has fallen in love with it, and it is super simple, so I can make enough for them and us.

Tuesday is band practice. I had a cold sore last week and couldn't play, so I'm looking forward to this week.

Then Thursday, July 2, is our "dating anniversary," eleven years as a couple. I have no idea what we're going to do, since money is tight. Olive Garden is our traditional dinner. yummmmmmm!

Then comes the Fourth of July. We have a parade in the morning, then we're playing for the Tigard Fireworks Show, the biggest fireworks display in the western suburbs. It always draws a massive crowd. Lots of Sousa and patriotic music for that day. And we get to watch the fireworks, so it's all good!!!

So, that's going to be my week, minus all the joyful surprises that pop up. Looks like this summer will be eventful.

History Repeats

2009-06-14T00:10:00.000-07:00

My husband and I were discussing politics, mostly him complaining about the turn toward socialism our country is taking. He wryly asked "What happened when Rome fell?"

Never ask a history buff a question like that!

That led me to a huge research bonanza on the collapse of the Roman Empire. Of course, the theories as to what triggered the fall are varied, as there can be no single source for something so massive. Plague, drought, economics, wars, religion, all play some role in the massive stage of this tragedy.

Instead of boring you with my research, let me point out one issue that piqued my interest.

Most historians agree that the beginning of the end began in 234 CE, with the "Crisis of the Third Century," a time of economic meltdown that makes the Great Depression look like a bounced check. It led to a shift in military and civilian life, which led to political anarchy.

A quick summary: the Sassanids of Persia threatened the eastern edge of the Roman Empire. Rome sent 20-25% of its military to the Middle East to deal with it. To accomplish this, they expanded the military by 1/4. Roman citizens did not want to fight a war far from home, so Rome was forced to recruit from the Germanic tribes to the north. In order to pay these new soldiers, they changed their coinage. Instead of pure silver, coins were made with cheap fillers. This caused a hyperinflation. Money became worthless. Trade was carried out in bartering. The imperial network of trade and economy collapsed, since they could not purchase items with their worthless coins. This led to a shift in policy, as Rome became most socialistic. People were ordered where to work, no choice. To force them to remain, workers were organized and forced into guilds, while businesses were grouped into what was called collegia. Laws forbade citizens from moving out of cities into the country to find work. Farmers were also tied to the land. Taxation became so inflated, people fled this life, regardless of the laws, and came to rich landowners seeking refuge, becoming a half-free class of citizen of coloni, what we call today "serfs." This directly led into the de-evolution from the world of Antiquity to Medieval feudalism.

Got all that? I know, it's a lot to digest. Cliff Notes: Rome fights Persians with Germanic soldiers, taxes the hell out of citizens, pumps their money into "foreign investments" (aka mercenaries), and collapses the economy in the process.

Meanwhile, the Persians took over the area around the Black Sea, pushing the Huns out. The Huns invaded northern Europe, pushing the newly-enriched German tribes southward, leading to many conflicts between these Visigoths and the Roman Empire, which led to the Sack of Rome in 410.

So... Rome responds to a threat from the Middle East, focuses a vast majority of its military there. Persia pushes on the Huns, who push on Europe. Meanwhile, Rome has given the Germanic tribes money and weapons. Once the wars cause Rome's infrastructure to teeter (leading to a spike in taxes, a turn toward socialism, and resulting in anarchy), the Visigoths use those weapons against the ones who provided them and strike from the north while Roman troops are focused in the Middle East.

Hmmmm!!!

America responds to terrorist threats in the Middle East, focusing many of our soldiers there. The Middle East pushes against India. India increases its military, which then makes Korea feel threatened. Meanwhile, America gave Korea a nuclear reactor back in the 70s, which recently led to Korea stating it is going to start building nukes. One missile they launched hit Alaska. (Anyone remember that? I bet Sarah Palin does!) Once the "war on terror" causes America's infrastructure to teeter (leading to a spike in taxes, a turn toward socialism, and likely resulting in anarchy), Korea strikes us from the north while American troops are focused on the Middle East.

OMGZ, it's the Sake of Rome all over again, but with NUKES!!! Run to your bomb shelters!!! WAAAAH!

Okay, comedy aside, I do believe history will forever repeat itself, and if we don't watch out, we're going to see something bad happen to this country. Maybe not immediately. From the Crisis of the Third Century to the Sake of Rome, almost 180 years passed. But events happened slowly back then. One could say our critical error was giving nuclear power to Korea, and that was Carter's administration. 30 years later...

I told all this to my husband. He says I should put in an application to be Obama's Historical Adviser. I wouldn't be good at that, for the same reason I'd make a horrible teacher. I'm prone to whack information into someone... literally.

Can I get an avatar of Obama being whacked over the head with a history book? :D

Indiginous People Around the World

2009-06-04T08:12:00.000-07:00

As some of you know, I've been intrigued with Native American culture since hearing that my ancestor was George Guess, aka Sequoyah, claimed to be the inventor of the Cherokee writing system, and yes, the redwood was named after him. This dubious ancestry has since been proven false.

"Sequoyah," really a portrait of Thomas Maw. Sequoyah was branded on
the forehead and had his ears cut off by White Men.

By the way, the story you may have heard in elementary school of Sequoyah is totally made up by White Men. Please read the true and gruesomely tragic real story of Sogwili, also known as Tahlontisoge, Sequoyah, George Guess, and other names. It is a good view into how White Men made up stories to cover up their barbaric deeds.

http://www.ani-kutani.com/nativeamericanfacts/tahlontisoge.htm

I do have Cherokee ancestry on my mother's side, which I uncovered in my genealogical research. My great-grandmother was Cherokee and had possession of Native lands in Oklahoma. At least, that was HER story, as told by my grandfather. Other members of her family stodgily deny any Cherokee heritage and insist she was descended from a famous British captain. Considering many people during that time period tried to hide any indigenous roots, I doubt Great-grandma Sada was lying.

Despite all this confusion, my interest in indigenous cultures continues. I studied Native American Anthropology in college and fell in love with lithology. Studying the various styles of arrowheads and the way they were formed is my favorite, and my professor was extremely impressed with my collection. She even allowed me to borrow her special collection of stone utensils for photography records. Prof. Bogdan was awesome like that!

This interest is slowly expanding. First, due to a book I was writing, I became intrigued with Australian Aborigines and their concept of Dreamtime. Then I fell in love with Tuvan throat-singing and began studying them and the Inuits, with their unique katajjaq.

Tuvan throat-singer

From there, I read about the Ainu people of Japan and their sadly lost musical art form known as rekuhkara. This technique was lost over thirty years ago. It's a case of a dominate society forcing a minority to "integrate" by forbidding their heritage. This is a common theme amongst many indigenous groups.

Ainu have lighter skin and wavy hair. Their thick beards are a sign of beauty,
so that women tattooed mustaches on their lips.

I'm also looking into indigenous groups of Europe. That gets to be a little harder, as tribes wandered all over and conquests occurred frequently. For instance, the British Isles were cleared of inhabitants by the Ice Ages, but after the glaciers pulled back, the first inhabitants to enter the land were of the Aurignacian culture (yes, I am a British history buff). Gaelic culture is also intriguing, especially since my grandmother was Irish. According to Wikipedia (I had to make sure I was right in this), the Britons are considered the indigenous group of southern Great Britain, and even they replaced others.

Conquests and dominance, that is the history of our world.

The Basques especially intrigue me ever since I read Shibumi (a novel which influenced much of my writing, even though I'm not into spy novels really). I've also found myself reading many articles on the Sami people of Scandinavia. It's ironic that these "white natives" are discriminated against even by other indigenous people... until you hear them sing a joik. Google it, it is so beautiful!!!

Sami family, circa 1900

I'm not sure what I'm rambling about now. I suppose my point in all this is to expose people to other indigenous cultures. Perhaps when you hear "native" you think Cherokee, Lakota, Apache, and Sioux. Many Americans do. They ignore the fact that most Mexicans come from Aztec and Mayans people, making them as "Native American" as the Gabrielino (the Natives of the area that is now Orange County, my hometown), and the Clackamas (the Natives of the area I now live in Oregon).

No matter where you go in the world, these old traditions have been persecuted, the dominant race eager to stamp them out or "integrate" them. Be it Aborigines, Tuvan, the Ainu, Basques, or the Sami, these ancient cultures are being threatened, and many are lost to us. This is a sad cycle, repeated over and over, one tribe defeating another, one race pushing out another, one country dominating another. In the struggle for power, the small are lost, but I hope they are not completely forgotten.

Star Trek (both a Non-Spoiler and a Spoiler review)

2009-05-12T16:00:00.000-07:00

My husband and I went to see the new Star Trek movie last night. No, we did not go as Vulcans. Yes, we did wear a few things to make us geeks. He had on his communicator pin, I wore my Bajoran earring, sans the nose ridges, enough to still be "cool" (aka geeky) without getting raised eyebrows. Cosplaying really only works on opening night, anyway. We tried going in full regalia the day after opening night during "Insurrection" and only got crowds staring at us.

First, my non-spoiler review.

The movie itself was great, far exceeding my expectations. I went into this trying to avoid spoilers and reviews, hoping to formulate my own opinion, yet still unable to sidestep the fan complaints (mostly from Matt) about the design of the new (old) ship and the look of the bridge. So I really didn't know what to expect, but still had rather low expectations. The first few minutes were enough to make me go "wow, this is going to be awesome."

Every actor took these well-loved, well-established characters and did them justice, holding onto certain mannerisms while still doing their own take on the characters. It was enough for people who grew up with Star Trek to nod and smile, while newer audiences could come to love these characters without... any... odd speech... patterns. Yes, I was VERY relieved Chris Pine did not assume Shatner's unique way of speaking. He gave the part the pure essence of "Kirk" without imitation. I felt this was true for many of the characters.

The plot is not completely unique. Time travel has been far overused in the sci-fi genre, in my opinion. Some of the technical aspects are totally not canon. I'm not talking special effects. How they portray transporters is up to the SFX team. I'm talking transporting while at warp. I'm not that "into" such details, but Matt pointed out that even in TNG, they had to drop out of warp, then beam someone.

What made me shake my head were some of the more specific scenes. Let me put it in Star Wars terms. Let's say they made a Star Wars prequel (yes, I know, they did three, and they were mediocre). Only, in the prequel, they kill off Captain Antilles (a minor character who still affects the plot), they blow up Endor (massacring all those cute Ewoks before they have a chance to save the Rebels), and Padme falls for Mace Windu (you know, Samuel L Jackson's awesome character). Yeah, that about does the "what the hell" aspect of this movie justice without spoiling any details.

For an explanation of what I mean, read the spoilers below.

================
================

SPOILER WARNING
================
================

(The following contains spoilers from the Star Trek movie, including plot and character development)

================
================

YOU HAVE BEEN DULY WARNED

================

================

Is that enough of a warning? :P

Okay, within the first ten minutes, I was shaking my head going "Wait a minute there! Kirk's father didn't die like that... did he? Um...." So see, the average Star Trek enthusiast is probably not going to realize anything is wrong. Someone like Matt will be chomping at the bit already. And that's the first scene!!!

Things seem to get better. We meet young Kirk and Spock, find Uhura in a bar, meet McCoy, and are even graced by Captain Pike, all beautiful faces, all holding true to their characters while putting in their own take. We see Kirk in academy, but it quickly jumps back to where Star Trek belongs... in space! Our beloved characters (Chekov and Sulu included, still no Scotty) all meet together on the bridge of the Enterprise.

That's where the fun begins. Biggest spoiler yet... ready for it?... They blow up Vulcan!

That's right, the planet goes byebye. 6 billion Vulcans plus Spock's mother die in the destruction.

Okay, right there I'm going "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!!!" Even your casual TV watcher will know planet Vulcan is still around, and Vulcans are not suddenly made into an endangered species.

The next eyebrow raising moment comes minutes after the destruction.

Uhuru + Spock

That's right, take the sexy black girl in a mini skirt and the stoic half-Vulcan with the bowl cut, put them in a tumbolift, and have a make-out scene. Not only that, but in hindsight, they appear to have a relationship while at the academy... and Spock is totally whipped!!! Uhura puts on a little pouty "but I wanted to be on the Enterprise with you" act and Spock cows to her wishes despite the roster already being set, certainly breaking a few regulations while he's at it. Spock ends up with more smooch time than Kirk... now that's just WRONG! Watching Spock kiss anyone is enough to raise your Vulcan eyebrows. "Fascinating" hardly covers it.

Everything is explained nicely, though. See, the bad guy is from the future, and he's screwing up the past. He's the one who killed Kirk's father, destroyed Vulcan, and by the end of the movie, creates a massive black hole near Saturn (which may or may not have collapsed on itself, Matt and I are still arguing that). So see, it's all a parallel universe.

I was seriously expecting a Voyager-special (aka, big "reset button" at the end, fix the timeline and everything reverts to what we expect). In a way, I'm glad they didn't do that. It works for a one-hour weekly series (once or twice, not a dozen times, Voyager!) but if you pull that stunt in a big movie, there will be rioting in the aisles as audiences complain "why did I spend $9 on a movie when none of it really happened in the end?"

This leads to one of two scenarios.

1) This is really gonna go where no one has gone before as the franchise embraces this "alternative" Star Trek universe (bad idea for the fan base).

2) They'll fix the whole thing in the sequel. Which means a reset button for TWO movies.

I'm betting on #2. These guys aren't dumb. They've hook the new audiences with big names, big fight scenes, and SFX which audiences have come to expect (Trekkers might complain that it's too much, but anything less would have been a disappointment to moviegoers and critics). Now you need to reel the fan base back in with a sequel that promises to fix the timeline.

This means Spock will be faced with the emotional dilemma of fixing time and restoring his planet, but at the expense of losing Uhura, since Spock Prime will inform him that they were never meant to hook up (Did I mention young Spock meets old Spock? That's a whole other story, but it worked so no complaints here.) Kirk will of course want this route, since it means his father will not have been killed by Nero. Audiences will be torn between "I want my daddy" from Kirk and "but I love her" from Spock. Confrontation ensues, probably with more Kirk/Spock fistfights. Fans will want the timeline to right itself, yet pity Spock.

Sounds like another blockbuster in the making!

So that's my two cents.

Live long and prosper!

Old Email, Old Rant

2009-05-10T14:38:00.000-07:00

I got this email today. I'm sure you've seen it a thousand times, so you can skip it if you want. I am not responsible for spelling error and grammatical debacles.

THOSE BORN 1920-1979

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED the 1930's, 40's,
50's, 60's and 70's!!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or
drank while they were pregnant.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our
tummies in baby cribs
covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

We had no child proof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and
when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention,
the risks we took hitchhiking.

As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats,
booster seats, seat belts or air bags.

Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a
special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and
NO ONE actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and
drank Kool-aid made with sugar, but we weren't
overweight because,
WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day,
as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to rea ch us all day.And we were OK.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and
then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes
After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the
problem.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no
video games at all, no 150 channels on cable,
no video movies or DVD's, no surround-sound or CD's, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or chatrooms........

WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth
and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the
worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games
with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would
happen, we did not poke out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and
knocked on the door or rang
the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those
who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law
was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

These generations have produced some of the best
risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation
and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we
learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!

If YOU are one of them CONGRATULATIONS!

You might want to share this with others who have had the
luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government
regulated so much of our lives for our own good.

While you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave (and lucky) their parents were.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with
scissors, doesn't it?!

---

Very true, but...

SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) was common due to sleeping on the stomach. Many children did not live past the age of 2. Mothers had 10 kids, but that's because 3 would die before reaching adulthood. Many drank Drano, swallow bottles of medication, or like my uncle, stuck knifes in light sockets because there was no such thing as child protection on these items. Some went out to play alone and were never seen again.

Those smoking mothers gave their children lung cancer.

Those kids who ate cupcakes and drank Kool-aid... those are the same people who now have severe cases of diabetes, right? And skin cancer from being outside all day.

My friends and I used to make mud pies... until one friend stepped on a muddy nail that went completely through her foot. She had to be rushed to the hospital for a tetanus shot and stitches. Her family did not sue mine, but she was not allowed to play with me anymore.

Our neighbor's kid received a BB gun, shot our cat in the head, my friends' pigeons, and nearly shot our neighbor's face.

I used to share my food and sodas with friends, until I caught scarlet fever and nearly died.

My friends and I used to build go-carts. Until one was hit by a car because he forgot brakes.

That was also the generation that started teen gangs, invented acid and crack, gave us the right to an abortion, and set the precedence to sue everyone we please. That was the generation that produced Charles Manson, Jeffery Dahmer, Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City bomber), Ted Kaczynski (Unibomber), David Koresh (Waco wakko), Lee Harvey Oswald, OJ Simpson, plus people like Norma McCorvey ("Roe" of Roe vs Wade), Stella Liebeck (the "hot coffee" sue-happy lady), and our corrupt politicians (too many to list).

Maybe our country is this way BECAUSE of those kids in the lead paint baby cribs.

Not that life wasn't simple back then. Laws these days make no sense. Little boys getting arrested of sexual harassment for kissing little girls on the cheek, or expelled for having old-fashion razor pencil sharpeners. My mom knows a neighbor who is 18, about to graduate, and cannot read nor even knows how to sign his own name. It's almost required for Pre-schoolers to have cellphones.

Still, this email makes me a little mad in presenting the idea of ignorance as better than general, sane precaution. Do you really want an alcoholic mother who doesn't care if her children die in the middle of the night or get cancer before they're 30, nor cares where their children go, who they visit, whether they break their arms, eat toxin-laced mud, or catches swine flu due to sharing sodas? The people of this "idealistic" generation should actually care enough to raise their own children instead of ignoring them and leaving the Playstation as a babysitter, too busy with work and their own selfishness to care what happens to their "pride and joy." Stop flaunting your own childhood and take a look at what you're presenting to your children. Gee, it's the exact same thing you're bitching about. "Children these days" aren't a consequence of technology and teachers. It's the fault of the PARENTS who could not care less because they're too busy sending email.

Okay, my little rant is over.

A Peek Into My OCD World

2009-04-29T12:28:00.000-07:00

Here is a classic example of why I have not published Book One of the Shadowstrider series (I know many of you are waiting for it, but be patient with me a little longer).

Okay, as you may (or likely may not) know, Shadowstrider is a multi-generational tale about a Native American family facing adventures only possible in the realm of science fiction (aliens, space pirates, psychic genocidal maniacs, and all that jazz). Many of the family members are religious, following the beliefs of Thekoni, the Great Eagle, and praying in their native language, Rovesia. I invented Rovesia to fill in the need for more "authentic" Native American scenes. Rather than simply say the character prayed to Thekoni, I actually write out the prayer in the native language followed by a translation. When a character gets highly emotions, they may curse in Rovesia (which are usually longwinded hexes). It is a language still in development, although I have a fairly good dictionary in the making.

For the most part, Rovesia was created on an "as needed" basis. In other words, if I want a character to say "The sky is blue" but I don't yet have a word for "sky," I create one based upon root terms (by the way, the phrase would be "Hidumoni udan ama"). This tactic has obvious flaws.

One, I only have so many root terms, so words can get complicated. I even have two characters jokingly compete for the longest Rovesia term they can think of; my favorite is a tie between aawethea'mojadu, or "wolf," literally "silver claw," and Hidumonifawawe, which is their name for the constellation Aquarius, literally "Sky-Jar."

Two, I sometimes use words not realizing the intent behind it. For example, I'll use an existing term for "cold" without double-checking if the root terms imply callousness or climate. I finally corrected this error by putting literal translations in my dictionary... such a hassle.
Three, I often create a new word although I already have a similar existing term, especially when I'm thinking too much in English. For instance, as you'll see below, I came up with a word for "correct" and a word for "true" separately, with totally different root meanings, although they mean the same in English.

What can I say, I'm not JRR Tolkien!

Alrighty, so I'm working on Book 12--that's the last book in the series, honestly--and as I write what is the most common Rovesia invocation, the morning prayer, I realize a glaring error. One of the lines goes "Fill my life with discernment and true answers." I sort of did a "head tilt" at the term "true answers." I always hated that phrase but could not come up with a better translation. The original term was duko koye, which has a literal translation of "bottom-answer (true)" and "answers." Obviously, some distasteful repetition going on there. So I considered it for a moment and thought "'true answers' means truth. I don't have a word for 'truth' yet because I always used duko koye. Truth is when all answers are correct. So why not one word, dukoye?" Directly translating dukoye would be impossible, and "true" and "correct" are adjectives and therefore incapable of being pluralized (-ye is a pluralization suffix). So the closest meaning would be "truth," changing the adjective into a noun.

A minor issue? Maybe, but I'm rather fond of my invented language and I want it to be perfect, or at least comprehensive. As I said, this is the most commonly-said prayer, so I want it to make sense.

So I looked in my handy-dandy Rovesia-English dictionary (a cumbersome text file at the moment) and realized another error. I have duko which means "true" and udsi which means "correct." But those have the same meaning. Crap! So I decided that, whereas duko is more in reference to an answer, udsi carries the implication of living one's live in wisdom (udsi literally means "to be wise"). Which means all references, in all twelve books, to both udsi and duko have to be examined to determine which intent I had in mind.

Luckily, I keep a list of all Rovesia phrases I use, which is a pain in the neck to document but so handy in mass corrections like this. Thankfully, udsi is not used too often. Duko is another matter, as the morning prayer with its duko koye phrase occurs at least once in every book. Due to sheer size and my computer whining about loading anything over 200 pages, I have my novels broken into three parts. Which means 36 files to search and adjust. When you add in my many files with notes for the series, that means over 40 pages to check. This might take half the day.

And this is why I have not published Book One. If I had, then the term duko koye would be in print and unable to change without making a new edition. Such is my OCD approach to writing. When I am satisfied with the whole series, including the languages I invented to give the tale a level of authenticity, then I will publish it. Until then... patience, grasshoppers, patience!

A New Definition of "Low Brass"

2009-04-27T06:06:00.000-07:00

Now here are some low sounds.

Subcontrabass Flute - more plumbing than your average kitchen!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9Nz0UGuQyc

Contrabass Ocarina - mystical and calming
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfL9BJ5Ve60

Subcontrabass recorder - gorgeous 400-year-old instrument, you need a stepladder just to put it together!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VcoV37kRFc

Contrabass Clarinet - short and sweet. I've played along with this instrument, and it is amazing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6HteNRMU5U

E-flat contrabass sax - playing one of my favorite jazz songs. If Ella Fitzgerald had sung this low, her voice would have gone out much sooner.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1t_vu_uQoQ

Contrabassoon - Bach would have applauded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEvY5q_DG2c

Contrabass Sarrusophone - a rare instrument, most popular in Frank Zappa songs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51lcyVGorYQ

Tubax and Soprillo - little shaky on the video, but great music and one talented guy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNyb3FzXZrs

Contrabass French Horn - Matt, welcome to the low brass section :P
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC3UvJpxXO8

Contrabass trombone - I've played on one of these suckers. So much fun!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXitAt16meo

"World's largest drum" - or at least largest "practical and played" drum, over 10 feet tall. Those drummers must get dizzy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xej7JDJ4lLs

And finally, just to show that women CAN play trombone (grrrrrl power):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t19NeJjrDI

No One Loves Dragons

2009-04-26T09:45:00.000-07:00

I was talking to my mother the other day, and things drifted into my work in writing. I was feeling excited about my progress when she burst my bubble. "Your father just mentioned the other day that you never publish ANYTHING." That's not completely true, but no novels yet. That comment left me feeling insulted. I mean, here I've got an awesome 12-novel series, but I swore not to publish the first book until I was done with the entire arc, since I keep changing things. If I publish Book One, I'm locked into that world setting. I want the freedom to be able to completely change a character's background.

It's not that I'm NOT WORKING. Many writers say that for a long novel--not a 150 page teen novel, but a 600 page behemoth--finishing it in three years is pretty darn good. Many take five or more years. Well, I started work on Book 3 in 2003 (the first two books were written in the 90s). I'm now in the process of writing Book 12. That means, in six years, I've written nine 600+ page books. Plus add in Blue Fire Dragon, which I finished last year. So that makes ten books in six years. TEN! Around 6,000 pages in 6 years.

Honestly, I have no life.

However, Mom was right. All this writing does no good if it's sitting within my laptop and not on the shelves of Barnes and Noble. So far, only myself and Matt have read my stories. He loves them, but he's biased.

I react to criticism with stubbornness, so I spent all morning searching literary agents, determined that, at the very least, I could thrust Blue Fire Dragon out there and see if they want the rest of the trilogy. In this business, publishers are closing their doors to unrepresented writers, so an agent has become as necessary as a Bachelor degree. Besides, I do NOT want to deal with legal crap. I would gladly fork over 15% to keep out of that mess.

The problem is, no one wants dragon stories. I've searched so many agencies, and many either hint that they are not looking for high fantasy, or flat out state "no swords-and-dragons." This post in the New Literary Agents Blog points out that the dragon genre has become saturated, so that even if you write an outstanding book, no publishers want it. Unless, of course, it's a children's fantasy, which Blue Fire Dragon most certainly is not. One of the main characters is a harlot, there are themes of racism, incest, animal cruelty, communism, and a touch of mysticism, plus a couple of the characters in the second book are lesbians. Honestly, it's not the type of book I'd want my mother to read, but I'm proud of how I handled these issues.

No love for dragons!

So who do I turn to now?

I decided to research Dragonriders of Pern. I've never read the series, worried that people might say I copied some other author. I now think maybe I SHOULD read a few dragon novels to ensure that I didn't inadvertently steal ideas. That's besides the point! Donald Maass Literary Agency represented Todd McCaffrey (son of Anne McCaffrey and currently continuing the Pern series), so I'm looking into them. Maybe they too have had their fill of dragons. Maybe they've been waiting for a fantasy/romance with a love triangle that involves a racial minority, a landless princess, and a professional harlot.

Man, that makes the novel sound really lame.

Still, I'm nervous about committing a novel for publication. My parents would hate most of what I write, since I like to tackle controversial issues. I fear public events, so things like book signings would be nerve-wracking. I know a dozen rejections is normal, but I fear such dismissal. What if they want to completely rework my lovely plot? What if it's published and flops? What if I'm scammed? Would the economy affect sales? Probably all typical fears of first-time authors, but it's definitely holding me back from simply submitting.

Are there any writers out there with suggestions on how I should proceed? I've read all the "what to look out for" forums and have a book on how to pick a literary agent, but I'm lacking in the confidence department right now. Hints on writing query letters? Advice? Encouragement? Cookies?

Not In Vain!

2009-04-23T06:12:00.000-07:00

Some people argue that there is no point to human existence. In the scope of the universe, we are nothing more than a heartbeat, a blink of the eye, thus in the grand scope of Time and Existence, we are nothing, inconsequential, with no real purpose. What we do makes no difference, since who will have remembered such troubling circumstances in ten years, let alone ten generations, ten millennia, ten epochs.

Good and evil, right and wrong, they are all arbitrary distinctions society devised to restrict what it deemed to be taboo behaviors, each depending upon environment, history, religious constructs, whimsies of the elite. They do not improve human nature, but restrict freedoms, a form of slavery society accepts since we are told that the alternative is anarchy, chaos, death, or damnation. Therefore, there is no such thing as "morality" and "virtue." Our decisions hold no other meaning that that which we give them. There is no true or false, since all are relative and subjective to the rules of society. No objective truth exists! Pontus Pilate famously questioned "What is truth?" Jesus never answered. Why? Because there is no answer to such subjective questions.

This is a crappy paraphrasing of postmodern nihilism, but hopefully I make my point. We exist in the moment between moments as eternity blinks out another century. No one knows how long we have to fulfill all the dreams we wish to make into reality. We rush Time in a race we know we cannot win. We follow rules because it is expected. We react in a scripted manner, predestined by rulers Eternity has forgotten.

When faced with the pressure to react to the decisions that must be made, however vital or mundane, we can either reject such responsibility, since, in the end, what does it matter... or we can rise to the challenge, cast aside the chains of conformity, and press on without thought to whether it matters or not.

Perhaps no one will ever know the deeds we perform. Perhaps they will be written down and recalled for a brief heartbeat in time. Lauded as a Robin Hood hero. Despised as the next Hitler. We take a chance in the choices we make, especially when we chose to go against conformity. The price of such freedom is too great for many.

Maybe the Borg are right and resistance is futile; we are merely avoiding the inevitable. Often, we will strive, fight, and race our hardest only to find failure or incompletion. However, the alternative is to give up, give in, and prove those nihilists right, that we really don't mean anything in the scope of Time. The best we can do is continue, to keep dreaming, and to work for our dreams.

If the actions I take bring me one step closer to reaching my goal, one more day to spend time with those I love, one fleeting moment in eternity to smile at friends and hug family, then it will be worth the struggle. It will not be in vain!

Caffeine Rush... Can you take it?

2009-04-11T23:49:00.000-07:00

I was looking up for caffeine content in drinks, trying to find the name of the tea that has really super high caffeine. Instead, I found some drinks that would literally knock your socks off, if not cause a stroke.

Coca-Cola: 2.88 mg caffeine per ounce (good baseline)
Pepsi: 3.17mg/oz... yet another reason why Pepsi is better than Coke.
Mountain Dew: 4.58mg/oz... weak!
Red Bull: 9.64mg/oz... meh...
Monster: 10mg/oz... boring
Rockstar: 10mg/oz... yawn
Jolt: 11.91mg/oz... actually weaker than coffee

Regular brewed coffee: 13.44mg/oz
Starbucks Doubleshot: 20mg/oz
Wired: 21.5mg/oz
Spike Shooter: 35.71mg/oz
Espresso: 55.44mg/oz

Here are the fun ones:

Boo-Koo - 15mg/oz, but one of the highest caffeine amounts per can (it's a big can, 360mg for the whole thing... weeee)

Fuel Cell - 90mg/oz, pure caffeine... with Splenda!

Mana Energy Potion - 118.52mg/oz, plus you'll have Zelda's theme song in your head all day.

Redline Power Rush- 140mg/oz, must be over 18... nice when your energy drink is like an R-rated movie.

Ammo - 171mg/oz... "We do not support or recommend you being an idiot and drinking this straight"... so why sell it that way?

Fixx Extreme 5ml - 400mg of weeeee (I loved reading this review, too. I think the writer was still on a buzz).
The energy drink version of this is now discontinued. I wonder why!!!
I read a review that 2 drinks can kill a 15-year-old kid, and it also tastes like crap. No duh! Concentrate liquid caffeine isn't meant to taste like Hawaiian Punch.

And here's the one that left my jaw dropped:

Fixx - 2352.94mg/oz... omg!!!
This comes in a small package. 0.17 oz, 400mg of caffeine in the package... it'll give you wings, alright!
It's like... a gel... thing... stuff. Apparently doesn't taste half bad. One reviewer suggested, if you're used to "only" Red Bull, Rockstar, and Monster, take only half a package.

Eye Color

2009-04-09T09:03:00.000-07:00

I was looking up on eye color. Whenever I fill out official forms and they ask for "eye color," I usually put either blue or hazel, depending on my mood. Once, someone looked and said, "You don't have any brown in your eyes, so they can't be hazel." My reply: "Today I don't. Tomorrow I might."

My eyes are just weird. Many people with hazel eyes claim they change color, whereas really it's just certain colors are "brought out" by other factors: clothing color, sunlight, etc. Hazel eyes have green, gray, and brown, so different colors can be highlighted.

I've compared photos of my eyes. They really do change color. Not just a little. I mean A LOT.

The first time anyone really notice my "chameleon eyes" was on my sister's wedding. I was a bridesmaid, and the dress was bright emerald green. As we were getting ready, my mom stopped me, stared at my face, and went, "Robyn, you're eyes are GREEN." I looked in the mirror. My eyes were totally emerald, no blue at all. This wasn't "bringing out" some specks of green already present. My eyes were never that color before in my life.

Another day, I was wearing a red dress. The friends I was with didn't really know me well enough to notice anything, but they kept staring. I finally had to ask (fearing I had something stuck in my teeth). They said my eyes were purple. I laughed. Was I suddenly some weird anime character? Then I went to the bathroom, and sure enough, my eyes had turned a brownish shade of lavender. It was actually a little disturbing. I wish I could find the picture of that day.

Lately, my eyes have turned steely gray, nearly silver, and even some amber flecks pop up once in a while. One picture I have of me wearing a burgundy dress, my eyes honestly look brown.

I'm not the only one in my family with odd eyes. I have an aunt whose eyes change color depending on her mood. If they go green... watch out!

Perhaps I can blame genetics. My father has blue eyes. My mother has dark brown. Her father had blue eyes, her mother brown. Of my siblings, three have dark brown eyes, one has hazel which are usually more greenish, and I have the freaky blue eyes that will change at a moment's notice. Blue, gray, emerald, lavender, amber, you name it.

In the research I've done, eyes are not supposed to do that, not suddenly, at least. Eye color can change around puberty, like from blue to hazel, but not after wearing something for a few hours.

Maybe I should wear a rainbow tie-dye and see what happens.

Turning Japanese

2009-03-27T20:31:00.000-07:00

A friend asked me, with all the Japanese anime I watch, have I ever actually picked up any Japanese?

My answer, totally tongue-in-cheek, was "Hai!"

A politely sarcastic laugh, then "No, really, do you know any, like, totally cool Japanese phrases?"

Totally deadpan, I replied, "Urusai, baka yaro. Korosu-zo. Nametonka?"

They were impressed.
I was ready to laugh.
I refused to translate.
Yes, it means what you probably think it means.

Epilepsy = Brilliance? Awesome!

2009-03-22T17:11:00.000-07:00

Note: this was totally ripped off of this author but only because I'm recovering from a seizure and can't think to write my own entry. Maybe after this spell, I will have a burst of creativity, eh? One can hope...

===

Did you know that the earliest references to epilepsy date back to the fifth millennium B.C. in Mesopotamia? That's a few years before Sarah Palin believes that the earth was even created. Sorry, I couldn't resist. Priests unsuccessfully tried to cure people with epilepsy by exercising the "demons" out of them. Atreya of India and later Hippocrates, both of whom recognized a seizure as a dysfunction of the brain, challenged this absurdity of superstitious thought surrounding epilepsy. But the superstitions surrounding epilepsy continued for hundreds of years.

I actually feel a bit honored to be amongst a rather commendable group of other epileptics. You see, epileptic seizures historically, have suggested a relationship with creativity or unusual leadership abilities. Scholars have long studied evidence that prominent prophets and other holy men, political leaders, philosophers, artists and scientists, suffered from epilepsy.
According to Epilepsy.com, Aristotle was apparently the first to connect epilepsy and genius.

His catalog of "great epileptics" (which included Socrates) was added to during the Renaissance. Only people from Western culture were included, however. So strong was this tradition that even in the nineteenth century, when new names of "great epileptics" were added, they were rarely chosen from among people in other parts of the world. Working from this biased historical legacy, the famous people with epilepsy that we know about are primarily white males.

Eve LaPlante in her book Seized writes that the abnormal brain activity found in temporal lobe (complex partial) epilepsy plays a role in creative thinking and the making of art. Neuropsychologist Dr. Paul Spiers says:

"Sometimes the same things that cause epilepsy result in giftedness. If you damage an area [of the brain] early enough in life, the corresponding area on the other side has a chance to overdevelop."

We know that epilepsy involves temporary bursts of excessive electrical activity in different locations in the brain, locations which house our bodily sensations and functions as well as our memories and emotions. Psychiatrist Dr. David Bear states that the abnormal brain activity found in temporal lobe epilepsy can play a role in creative thinking and the making of art by uniting sensitivity, insight and sustained, critical attention. According to Dr. Bear:

"A temporal lobe focus in the superior individual may spark an extraordinary search for that entity we alternately call truth or beauty."

What is also clear in the discussion of genius and epilepsy is that some of the most famous people in history had seizures. People with epilepsy have excelled in every area.

The list of famous authors and playwrights whom historians believe had epilepsy is a bit overwhelming. It includes: Dante, the author of The Divine Comedy, who is not only Italy's pre-eminent poet but one of the towering figures of Western literature; Moliere, the master comic dramatist of the eighteenth century whose plays Tartuffe, The Imaginary Invalid and The Misanthrope are still being regularly performed today; Sir Walter Scott, one of the foremost literary figures of the romantic period whose books like Ivanhoe and Waverley remain widely read classics; the 18th century English satirist Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels; the nineteenth century American author Edgar Allan Poe; as well as three of the greatest English Romantic poets, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Charles Dickens, the Victorian author of such classic books as A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist had epilepsy, as did several of the characters in his books. The medical accuracy of Dickens's descriptions of epilepsy has amazed the doctors who read him today.

Lewis Carroll, in his famous stories Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, was probably writing about his own temporal lobe seizures. The very sensation initiating Alice' adventures- that of falling down a hole- is a familiar one to many people with seizures. Alice often feels that her own body (or the objects around her) is shrinking or growing before her eyes, another seizure symptom. Carroll recorded his seizures, which were followed by prolonged headaches and feeling not his usual self, in his journal.

From his writings we know a lot about the epilepsy of the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, author of such classics as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, who is considered by many to have brought the Western novel to the peak of its possibilities.

Dostoevsky had his first seizure at age nine. After a remission which lasted up to age 25, he had seizures every few days or months, fluctuating between good and bad periods. His ecstatic auras occurring seconds before his bigger seizures were moments of transcendent happiness, which then changed to an anguished feeling of dread. He saw a blinding flash of light, then would cry out and lose consciousness for a second or two. Sometimes the epileptic discharge generalized across his brain, producing a secondary tonic-clonic (grand mal) seizure. Afterward he could not recall events and conversations that had occurred during the seizure, and he often felt depressed, guilty and irritable for days. Epilepsy is a central source of themes, personalities, and events in his books; he gave epilepsy to about 30 of his characters.
The other great nineteenth century Russian author, Count Leo Tolstoy, author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace, also had epilepsy.

Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia about 2,300 years ago and one of the greatest generals in history, had epilepsy. At the time epilepsy was known as "the sacred disease" because of the belief that those who had seizures were possessed by evil spirits or touched by the gods and should be treated by invoking mystical powers.

Julius Caesar, another brilliant general and formidable politician, had seizures in the last two years of his life, possibly caused by a brain tumour. Caesar was known to have fallen convulsing into the River Tiber. By this time, epilepsy had become known as "the falling sickness" because the kind of seizures that made a person lose consciousness and fall down were the only kind then recognized as epilepsy. (Complex partial seizures were not recognized until the middle of the nineteenth century.) Human blood was widely regarded by the Romans as having curative powers, and people with epilepsy in Caesar's time were commonly seen sucking blood from fallen gladiators.
Napoleon Bonaparte was probably the most brilliant military figure in history. He too is known to have had epilepsy.

Another extraordinary leader of a very different time and place was Harriet Tubman, the black woman with epilepsy who led hundreds of her fellow slaves from the American South to freedom in Canada on the Underground Railroad. Tubman developed her seizure disorder through sustaining a head injury: her slave master hit her in the head with a rock.

Saint Paul's seizure-like experiences are the best documented of the major religious figures. On the road to Damascus he saw a bright light flashing around him, fell to the ground and was left temporarily blinded by his vision and unable to eat or drink. Paul is thought by some physicians to have had facial motor and sensitive disturbances coming after ecstatic seizures; they have diagnosed him with temporal lobe epilepsy which occasionally developed into secondary tonic-clonic attacks.

Joan of Arc was an uneducated farmer's daughter in a remote village of medieval France who altered the course of history through her amazing military victories. From age thirteen Joan reported ecstatic moments in which she saw flashes of light coming from the side, heard voices of saints and saw visions of angels.

In the opinion of the neurologist Dr. Lydia Bayne, Joan's blissful experiences "in which she felt that the secrets of the universe were about to be revealed to her"- were seizures, and they were triggered by the ringing of church bells. Joan displayed symptoms of a temporal lobe focus epilepsy: specifically, a musicogenic form of reflex epilepsy with an ecstatic aura. Musicogenic epilepsy is generally triggered by particular music which has an emotional significance to the individual. Joan's voices and visions propelled her to become an heroic soldier in the effort to save France from English domination and led to her martyrdom in 1431, burned at the stake as a heretic when she was 19 years old.

Soren Kierkegaard, the brilliant Danish philosopher and religious thinker considered to be the father of existentialism, worked hard at keeping his epilepsy secret.

In the fine arts, Vincent van Gogh is today probably the most widely known and appreciated artist with epilepsy. "The storm within" was how van Gogh described his typical seizure, which consisted of hallucinations, unprovoked feelings of anger, confusion and fear, and floods of early memories that disturbed him because they were outside his control.

Van Gogh also had convulsive seizures; a hospital worker witnessed Vincent having one while painting outside. He was prescribed potassium bromide as an anticonvulsant and ordered to spend countless hours bathing in tubs at the asylum in Saint-Remy. His most troubling seizures peaked with his greatest art in the south of France, where he painted A Starry Night, the extraordinary Self-Portrait, and the famous Crows in the Wheatfields.

There have been a number of prominent composers and musicians with epilepsy. George Frederick Handel, the famous baroque composer of the Messiah, is one. Niccolo Paganini is another. Paganini was an Italian violinist and composer considered by many to be the greatest violinist of all time. The eminent Russian composer of the ballets Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, Peter Tchaikovsky, is believed to have had epilepsy. Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the greatest masters of music, may have had epilepsy as well.

Modern writers who had epilepsy include: Dame Agatha Christie, the leading British writer of mystery novels, and Truman Capote, American author of In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's.
Modern actors with epilepsy include Richard Burton, Michael Wilding, Margaux Hemingway and Danny Glover.

On second thought, boy oh boy, that sure puts the pressure on me to be brilliant. Oh well, I can be one of the not so fabulous epileptics that achieved mediocrity in full force.

===

May I also add to this list:

* Hugo Weaving, one of my favorite actors of all time

* Hector Berlioz, super awesome composers, one of my favs

* Robert Schumann, another fav

* Vladamir Lenin

* George Gershwin

* Neil Young

* Leonardo di Vinci

* Michelangelo

* Pythagoras (remember him from Trig?)

* Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson

*Jean Clemens, daughter of Mark Twain

* Hikari Oe, musician and son of one of my favorite Japanese authors, Kenzaburo Oe

Would You Buy My Hair?

2009-02-22T14:09:00.000-08:00

Times are tough, Matt's been trying for two months to find a job with no luck, and we're looking into ways to make money.

Matt's been growing his hair for Locks Of Love, and it's at 11 inches, long enough to cut. So I looked up about SELLING hair instead.

Turns out, selling one's hair is big business. 11 inches can fetch an easy $100-200. So I measured my hair (haven't done that in a while) plus the thickness. I compared it to what the going price is for hair my length.

From the nape of the neck to the ends, it's a little over 40 inches. Thickness is 4 1/2 inches. My hair is what's called "virgin hair," in other words, not colored, not permed or treated in any way, and I despise blow dryers. I don't smoke or do drugs (besides my regular meds) or drink heavily. So that's top dollar hair! Plus it's a "natural color," a shade of brown I always hated because it's sort of plain. Some of you may recall when I dyed my hair blue-black in high school It has a limp curl that kinks up if it's short (why I keep it long). That natural waviness is desirable. You should see Matt's hair! He gets the cutest ringlets

According to sites I looked at, I could fetch $2500-3000 for my hair. WOW! Of course, if I cut it, it will not be that short. I look terrible with short hair. Still, 30 inches will fetch $1000 easy.

So, there is one way of making quick money if we really hit bottom. Right now, things aren't that desperate. Matt's folks are helping a lot. Matt is doing everything possible to find a job, even non-tech jobs, like retail or taxi driver, or even a car salesman! Now he's applying to the police academy, anything to get a steady paycheck. Nothing has worked out yet. I'm trying hard to get well enough to reenter the workforce. My seizures are down, which is making my memory issues less of a problem (seriously, waking up and not knowing who you are is very frightening), and my phobias are getting better, probably because the seizures aren't as bad so I'm not as terrified to go out in public. Man, I really hate agoraphobia!

So, I don't have to be Fantine just yet.
(I wonder how many know that reference?)

Can I Restart This Week?

2009-01-19T23:07:00.000-08:00

Okay, this had been my week:

Sunday - started getting sick, not a way to start the week.

Monday - flu/cold/something nasty hit me pretty hard.

Tuesday - slept all day... literally! Missed band, rather pissed about it.

Wednesday - sick, blowing my nose, coughing, moaning and groaning, slept through all the crap meds. I don't really recall Mon-Wed.

Thursday - I spent over an hour playing psychologist for my poor stressed out mother (they're about to lose their house and lots of other issues I can't discuss)

Friday - Matt got laid off... again! The day pretty much went downhill from there.

Saturday - My symptoms mutated from snuffly cold to achy flu, I now have no clue what I've caught and it's not getting better. Then to top it off, Capone got diarrhea all over the carpet... joy!

Sunday - I got a call that my brother-in-law's family were in a serious accident; a chunk of metal went through their windshield while driving down the freeway, hit my uncle-in-law in the face, busted his jaw and eye socket, missed piercing his brain by half an inch, then it went through the back of the car and missed his son's head by two inches. The impact knocked him out, and by a miracle his wife managed to grab the wheel and keep them from crashing or flipping. He's in the hospital awaiting massive reconstructive surgery; my sister's family is in shock.

Monday - A new week, I'm just beginning to feel better, then I'm woken up at 2am with a bloody nose. Once that's stopped, my stomach began to seriously cramp up and I realized I started my period. I have a feeling today is not going to turn out good at all.

Then tomorrow.... the most liberal President since FDR will be sworn in. Although he's African American and I'm glad the color barrier that has plagued politics in this country has been broken at last, and he seems very charismatic and surrounding himself with people who know what they're doing, I severely disagree with Obama's views and worry what might become of this country.

(psst, FYI-- Franklin D. Roosevelt used the New Deal to give people jobs, but he prolonged the Depression in the process, and our country could not recover until we were thrust into WWII... so a Socialist President coming into power during a time of financial meltdown with world events looking like a bad Hollywood rendition of Armageddon... yeah, it concerns me. We're praying... a lot!)

I am afraid to wonder what ELSE could happen. If I say it aloud, I might jinx something.

Can I just have a do-over? Where is the reset button on life?

The Plot Less Traveled

2009-01-11T07:26:00.000-08:00

Matt gave a warm reception to my latest chapter. It involved him running into the living room, grabbing me up, jumping up and down, shouting "Gimme more, gimme more! Want next chapter! More! More!" I think that's the most encouraging reception I've ever received.

Any writer knows, no matter how you plot your novel, no matter how detailed the outline or extensive the notes, sometimes an event happens that you just don't expect. In my case, Matt has been watching Charmed reruns for months, going through the entire series, and is now going back through for episodes he particularly liked. He has ideas he wants to see done in Shadowstrider. Some things I think are intriguing, some I just raise an eyebrow and tell him firmly "No!"

I have a character with psionic abilities. Matt's idea was to have this character able to, for lack of a better word, teleport. It's a lot cooler explained than simply she can go from one place to another instantaneously, but I'm trying to keep things vague so I won't spoil any plotiness.

This concept of teleportation was solely Matt's idea, having watched a dozen ways the demons, witches, and white-lighters do this on the television show. A cheap plot device, hero has to get ten miles away to save helpless dame from evil demon, but jumping into your car and driving that far, especially in San Francisco where the show takes place, will take such a long time, our hapless dame would be worse than dead by then. How do we shorten the episode time and make things more fast-paced and exciting? Oh wow, look, they can teleport anywhere, and lookie, simple computer graphics make it all so pretty!

Matt basically wants to turn my character into a white-lighters, "orbing" from one place to another, with the body dissolving into white glowing orbs of energy that float away. The concept of turning into energy was one I established back in Book 3, and this is Book 8, so it's not something new. In Book 7, it is a major issue in almost a third of the story. Other characters have turned into energy, but energy has to travel. Going from point A to point B can be done super quick, but teleporting? I dunno...

So we've been haggling how to handle this. Charmed is all about magic. Shadowstrider makes fun of the possibilities that exist in the realm of science being passed off as impossible and therefore shoved into the catch-all phrase of "magic." So whatever it is I'm doing, it has to be within the laws of physics. E=mc^2

Of course, all of Books 7 & 8 are Matt's idea. If I stray from the usual pattern, I can blame him. The two of us, over dinner at Shari's, came up with an outline for these two books, but it was generalized for the most part. I have strayed from so many key issues. Just a few days ago, I went through and changed the names of three characters, including one who is mentioned in all ten books. About to wrap this story up, and I'm making massive changes like that!

Then again, the fun things about plot outlines is deviating away from them and seeing what strange areas we end up in.

At least the reception he gave me after reading the finish chapter was good.

The Sex Scene

2009-01-09T07:07:00.000-08:00

A writer friend and I were discussing sex scenes in novels. These tend to go three ways:

1) PG-13 fluff, man and woman kiss, maybe go so far as to collapse together in a bed, cut scene before anyone gets naked;
2) trashy romance novels, rippling muscles, heaving breasts;
3) smut-books, oh-baby-god-yes with screaming profanity.

In her endearingly blatant way, my friend brought up that people either fear any form of romantic involvement between characters (oh dear, high schools can't force their apathetic students to analyze your novel), they read Fanny Hill as a teen and think anything vaguely erotic has to contain enough nearly-archaic words to make the reader forget what is going on as they research a dictionary (example: "lo, a turgid passion did throb in the weapon of his manhood as, through the revealing casement, he beheld the swathes of virescent and rufous chenille tumble off the junoesque ingénue, disclosing her swart opulence, as her limpid orbs gazed wistfully into the hesperian blush of the gloaming welkin"), or they are oversexed (or even more likely, undersexed) slash wannabes who believe every moan of the porno business, that sex really can't be good unless it involves oral, vaginal, and anal sex with a cum shot and lots of vulgarities. Androgynous boys and lesbian twins help, too. And fetishes. Lots of fetishes.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but the last thing I want to hear as I experience utter physical bliss is a guy yelling "oh f***, yeah, you b****, I f***ing love how you f*** my c*ck." Just ... no!

In the book I'm currently working on, more than in any other serious project, I'm faced with many explicit scenes as my young main character discovers love in its many forms, from cute teen love with fears of loss of virginity, to endearing romance and walks along the beach, to the persistent jerk who only wants a wife, to total WTF oddities only possible in the realm of science fiction. Therefore, I've been experimenting with how many ways to present the trouble of a love scene.

I've already had my husband tell me to tone down one scene, and for my own defense, I knew it was over the top, reaching into Category 3: the smut novel. It was an experiment in writing, done mostly because I wanted to see if I could write that graphically. I got it out of my system, yay me, time to get serious again and at least tame it to rated R. After all, I want Barnes and Noble to be able to sell this book, not Fanny Hill's Bordello of Books.

I've also gone so far as to write a whole love scene in which I say very little about what the two characters are doing, but by describing what is going on around them (sex on the beach is very nature-filled) I show the reader precisely what is going on in my own roundabout way. And yes, there are many cutaway scenes, nothing more than pulling toward the bedroom, then cut to the next morning. After all, a reader doesn't have to be told the gory details every time a couple copulates or the intensity of the scene vanishes into blasé acceptance. Ho hum, she's at it again.

One thing I aim for in any lovemaking scene is the "love" part, an element too often missing in novels these days. Even if it's with a total stranger or friend-with-benefits, there has got to be a reason, emotions the character feels. I don't want to be Lady Chatterley's Lover and spend ten pages delving into his/her emotional mindset, not when it'll probably take the reader longer to read all that emo-tripe than it would take them to have the ride of their life, but I think a reader deserves to know just why Johnny and Susy are playing hanky-panky in the backseat of a Buick.

Crude? Verbose? Coy? The nice thing about this current project is I have 800+ pages already (yeah, major editing needed) to experiment a little with it all, from the adorable to the abnormal. And if it's too much, that's what editors are for. I'm sure, like my husband, someone's going to tell me to take it down a few notches.

Of Cats and Christmas Trees

2009-01-09T04:20:00.000-08:00

I never celebrated Christmas as a kid, but I knew about all the usual traditions involved. As one comic writer I love put it, "Jesus was born in a manger, so we go shopping at Macy's." Yes, a hapless tree, poisonous holly, and parasitic mistletoe to dupe chaste women into osculating.

It didn't make sense as a child, it still doesn't makes sense.

BUT my hubby loves Christmas, despite his mother being Jewish and coming from what was, for all intents and purposes, a Jewish family, albeit not a strict one as I learned one Christmas evening when his mother told me we were having ham for dinner.

His parents were coming up for Christmas, and since our place is far larger than my uncle-in-law's tiny bachelor pad, it was my duty to provide a Christmas dinner.

Um... great! I know nothing about Christmas dinners.
And if we didn't look properly festive, oy ve, watch out!

The Tree:

We spent money we didn't really have for all the obligatory accouterments of the season: poor tree, plastic wreath, stockings from Dollar Tree, in fact, most of our things came from the Dollar Tree. The ice storm we had the week earlier snapped off a lot of pine branches, so I cut off a few and put sprigs around the house. Gotta admit, the place smells marvelous!

One thing I can say: trees and cats don't mix! Sumo (aka Capone) body-slams everything, and Ninja (aka Stetson) attempts sneak attacks on anything that moves/doesn't move/might-possibly-in-this-century move.

My hubby is a major Trekkie, and for years, his parents would get him the annual Star Trek ornament. Therefore, half our ornaments comprised of starships, Borg cubes, various captains, shuttle crafts, and alien ships. There are plenty of music-related things to hang up as well, stuff I've collected because it was adorable and my traditionalist hubby insisted were really supposed to be ornaments. Whatever. I've learned, when it comes to some issues, just make a man happy.

Thus we had our dead tree. I have to throw it out in two days for the apartment's recycling deadline, but I'm holding onto that thing for the moment. It was sacrificed for the sake of archaic pagan tradition, but it makes one heck of an air freshener. I'm going to keep some sprigs around, considering the ones I gathered for Christmas dinner have dried out. At least the life of that lovely little tree brought happiness for a fleeting moment.

Okay, enough of me being emo over the evergreen. Worse things are done in the name of religion and tradition than the existence of tree farms.

The Dinner:

Dinner with the in-laws went well. We still had lots of snow, so that afternoon we slushed out to Summerlake Park, which at that moment was the most ironically named place I could imagine, gazing out over fields of snow and a frozen lake. We built a snowman, threw snowballs, and let the crazy Californians have their winter delight. It was my mother-in-law's first White Christmas, so she was having fun, although the slush involved three days after a snow and ice storm is not as romantic as Bing Crosby crooned it to be.

Then we marched back home, and since the ham was pre-baked and just needed warmed, everything went into the oven all at once. Green bean casserole, pineapple candied yams, Hawaiian rolls, a trip to the honey-baked ham store, pumpkin pie, and homemade chocolate chip cookies. I had a table-center of the tree branches I cut with a three-candle display I had for a while and some glittery red and white candles from $Tree. Music came from TSO mostly, whatever we had in our iTunes collection. There were all the usual compliments, but most importantly, no one fell sick afterward, unlike a party Matt and I went to where he ate a dessert I did not try and got ill. It was a dessert someone brought, so our dear host and hostess were not to be blamed.

I made a special crock pot brew of mulled apple cider. After assuring them I said "mulled" not "mold," they agreed to a taste, and that quickly became the beverage of choice through the night, even over the egg nog, coffee, wine, Martinelli's, cream soda, and other drinks we splurged on.

1 gallon apple cider (unfiltered tastes better, but regular cheap brand works)
1/2 cup brown sugar
3 cinnamon sticks
12 whole cloves
1 tsp ginger or use crystallized ginger
optional 1 tsp whole allspice (I couldn't find any, and it tasted fine)

Pour cider into crock pot. Mix brown sugar until dissolved; if powdered ginger, mix that too, if crystallized, put it with other seasonings. Wrap cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and allspice into cheesecloth (if you don't have cheesecloth, use a tea ball, coffee filter, or just make sure you fish them all out before serving). Toss in an unpeeled orange to float, or for a tangier taste, float orange slices (I've tried both). Cook high 2 hours or low 4-6 hours. Let the crock pot sit uncovered to make the whole house smell divine! Serve into mugs with a ladle

Optional: add a splash of rum or brandy to each mug, float a pat of butter, add orange slice or cinnamon stick to each mug, many things you can do to individualize your recipe.

The Loot:

I've sort of forgotten much of what I received. Tis better to give, right? Matt got me Prince Caspian. His mom got me new kitchen gloves that I totally needed, plus nice shower gel and crystal-etched nail files that are so wonderful. Matt's uncle knows I love lighthouses, so everything was lighthouse-themed: a little ceramic lighthouse, a DVD on Oregon lighthouses, a fridge magnet, and of course the obligatory 2009 calendar. Matt got the iPod alarm clock he really wanted, Dark Knight, an Andrew Lloyd Webber CD, as well as AC/DC's new album that he's been drooling over. And the kitties got a new scratching post. Their old one was thrashed!

Great Christmas Memory:

Now remember, our cute evergreen was covered in sci-fi paraphernalia. One thing that got everyone cracking up was when I saw Stetson (mister chew-everything) nibbling on a Bird of Prey (must have thought it was a green parrot).

Not thinking, I yelled at him, "Stetson, don't chew on the Klingons!"

Two seconds later, splitting laughter from all around. (Maybe you had to be there, but it was really hilarious)

A couple hours later, he attempted to nibble the lowest ornament, the Borg cube. My earlier comment prompted Matt to quote the lovable Q: "How many times do I have to tell you: don't provoke the Borg!"

Stetson's insatiable chewing habit meant no ornaments for the first two feet of tree. Of course, our tree is only about four feet tall. He attempted to chew on the branches, but I guess they don't taste as good as Klingons. By luck, the tree is still upright, so the tannenbaum might become a tradition around here. Of course, no offense to Bing Crosby, but I'd rather spend my winter in So-Cal with family and friends than chipping ice off the car.

Watching the hippie Priuses slipping along the road was sort of fun, though.

The Wrist Pop

2008-08-11T16:59:00.000-07:00

I damaged my wrist a couple days ago (don't ask how, really!) We can't afford X-rays, but I broke my wrist in 4th grade, I remember what it was like, and this isn't as bad. I've got a brace on it that prevents my wrist and thumb from moving. As for the bones, they're not too bad or I'd be in enormous pain, and honestly my wrist feels great so long as I don't use it. Maybe sprained, maybe broken, who knows. If it's still really sore after my birthday, we might suck it up and get x-rays after all. I REALLLLY do not want to be in a cast during the summer again.

Typing like this hurts after five minutes or so, which means my novel writing is on hiatus. That's fine, I just finished Shadowstrider Book 7 a couple weeks ago. I don't think I blogged about that, so belated YAY for me! Anyway, with the book done, I can go through and start revisions. So my wrist gets some rest.

Otherwise, I'm fine. Matt's taking me out tomorrow for my birthday. And he has a special present for me. I get to find out tomorrow.

Best of wishes to everyone! Summer is halfway over. Ahhhhh!

8-8-08

2008-08-08T08:08:00.000-07:00

Just posting about the numerological significance of today. 8-8-08.

One of my favorite weird numerological coincidences was an old neighbor's sister whose lucky number was 8. She had a lovely baby girl on 8-8-88 at 8:28 who weighed 8 pounds and 8 ounces. Now that's cool!

Oh, and yay for the Olympics!

I know there's all sorts of brouhaha about it being in China and political issues and human rights protests, but you know what, the Olympics were meant to transcend politics. It didn't matter if you were from democratic-loving Athens or one of those toss-the-baby-over-the-cliff oligarchical Spartans (insert obligatory "THIS IS SPARTA" just to get it out of my system), athletes came to the Olympics to compete for individual glory. In fact, during the Greek Olympics, there was a truce held throughout Greece (and yes, Sparta did once break that truce, so they were forbidden from attending... don't ask how I remember these weird historical facts).

Anyway, the Olympics were MEANT as a time of peace, a promotion of camaraderie, a celebration of the human form and physical strength.

True, it's had its political moments. The Nazi's hosting the Berlin games as an "oh look at us we're the good guys" maneuver, then demanding that the USA not have two Jewish athletes, only to receive an in-your-face from African-American Jesse Owens ("take that you racist Nazi scumbag"). And those two guys with their Black Power salute back in the 60s. And let's not forget the 1996 bombing or the Black September terrorists. (shudder)

For some people, politics are just too hard to put behind them. For some, winning a metal isn't just about a personal achievement, it's a national victory. No matter how we optimists would love the Olympics to be "pure" and a competition for Humans, not insert-nationality-here, I also try to be a realist (difficult and not as fun, I know). Considering the condition of this world, I'm surprised political problems have been so few. If you bring that many nations together, you're gonna have issues. Many people are just too shallow, mundane, uneducated (and all sorts of insults I can toss out knowing they will all bounce off their rubbery, hollow heads) to accept that we are one race: Human!

It's gonna take the Vulcans coming to teach us that bit of logic, I guess :P

But you have no idea how many times I've heard people compare the Beijing Olympics to the Nazis. I mean, come on, this is Godwin's Law in flamboyant action here! My favorite is the claim that the Olympic torch is made from Nazi gold, because "Levono" (Chinese name for powerhouse company IBM) had something to do with the gas chambers. What that "something" is, no one will say. I mean, why don't you blame 14 million deaths on the company that made the frickin' locking mechanism, and then claim the Olympics are Nazi because the port-a-pots all use the same frickin' locks.

Really, it's that crazy. I for one am going to watch those US gymnastics girls with the same amazed wonder as if they were in Egypt, Spain, Lithuania, Kuwait, or Easter Island.

Yeah, okay, that's enough for my lousy rant. I'm so bored. Can't wait for my birthday!

Happy 8-8-8.

Capone

2008-06-27T20:55:00.000-07:00

This is my new kitty, Capone.

Capone is a very rare male calico. Only 1 in 3000 calicoes are male, and it is due to a genetic anomaly known as Klinefelter's syndrome.

For a cat to be a calico, it takes two X genes, one carrying an orange characteristic and one carrying the non-orange characteristic (usually black). Since a cat needs the XX combination of genes to be calico, it means 99.99 percent of the calicoes out there are female, giving rise to the myth of "there's no such thing as a male calico," something my vet told us on our first visit. Boy, was she nonplussed when she realized Capone really was male. She said, in her 10 years as a vet, she had never actually seen a male calico!!!

These rare XXY male calico cats rarely live past the age of two, are usually sterile, and are prone to numerous genetic disorders. We got very lucky on this boy. He's 5 years old, which means no early death, he doesn't seem to have any cognitive disabilities, our confounded vet had to shave him to see his underdeveloped manhood, but it's there... barely.

The only problem he's having is some stomach ailments as we try to find food he can digest, and he is FAT. The last owner took him to the vet, worried about diabetes. He's on a special diet now, but the weight just isn't going off. It might be another genetic thing, we don't know.

He gets along great with Stetson and seems to be calming him down, or at least distracting him. He's got a wonderful playful side to him and really tears after his dangly play stick thing.

He's been declawed (poor kitty, don't ever do that to cats, people!) but he quickly realized he has the weight over Stetson. When they play together, he does this sumo wrestling pounce and floors Stetson right down. It's hilarious to see this pudgy cat do a smackdown on Stetson, who is longer and more muscular (not fat, but big) but not anywhere near Capone's whopping 24 pounds!!!

We found him on Craig's List. The last owner had to get rid of him due to a boyfriend with allergies, and being declawed, he can't be tossed outside. Poor guy, I say toss the boyfriend outside!!!

Anyway, she said his name was Chubbs (totally appropriate) but that before that, when she got him, his name had been Capone. She thought that was a terrible name for a cat. Matt and I looked at each other and nodded. Yep, that's the perfect name for our little pudge ball.

Plus, "Stetson and Capone" just sound good together.

One interesting thing to note: black cats are considered unlucky, and calico cats are considered lucky. So they balance each other, a sort of yin-yang thing. Of course, I think all cats are wonderful, no matter the color of their fur, and all cat owners are doubly lucky to take in such quixotic and lovable pets!

After a Hiatus, My Mind is an Icy Pop

2008-06-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

After a few months away from blogging, MySpace, emails, and the internet in general but for research (with no regrets or withdrawals, I might add), I've checked back in, mostly to see if anyone has messaged me and to hack away at my email account.

Update: we have a new cat, Capone, a MALE calico (very rare XXY chromosome). Our vet had actually never seen a male calico before and told us they almost never live past 2 years. Capone is a whopping 5 years, which means he managed not to get any of the weird genetic disorders male calicoes are prone to. His only problem is his weight. His last owner just fed him whenever the dish was empty, so he's 24 pounds now. The vet says we've got to get him down to 12-15 pounds. So the poor guy is on a special wet food diet and hates us for taking away his regular food. He and Stetson get along as well as two boys are expected to, which means one minute they're rolling around fighting, the next minute they're curled together licking each other.

Matt's folks will be up here for the 4th. That should be fun. We're getting ready for a concert on the night of the 4th. We're playing for the city's big fireworks show. Ooh, and I've got a solo. I'm the youngest trombonist and still the "new kid" in the group, but the guy who would usually play the part is going away for the 4th, so I get it, yippee!!! It's to "Good Ol' USA" which anyone from the Santa Ana Winds will remember. Thanks to the Winds, I know the solo quite well, thus I managed to shock those gray-beards... omg, a 20-something GIRL can play dixieland? LOL!!! They really are shocked I can play it, it's hilarious. I'm not telling them I played the part for 6 frickin' years.

I FINALLY got my trombone fixed from the crunch it received thanks to PDX. They got the bell straightened out and a tweak to the slide, and I went for the full sonic cleaning since the thing probably hasn't had a professional cleaning in 50 years. It's so lovely!!! Now I want to get all the little scratches and the lacquer problem taken care of. Next stim-bate check!

That's about all that's been happening. Wow, I live a boring life. Well, most of my time is eaten up writing, and I now do that solely on my laptop, and this old thing doesn't like looking up websites. It's an antique Powerbook G3, great for just using OpenOffice (I didn't like NeoOffice and don't even ASK why I would use something as asinine as M$Word because I will have to smack some sense into you) but if I try to get it to look up graphically intense websites or anything on YouTube, it just doesn't cut it. So I've learned there is more to life than wasting it on stupid video shorts and hours siphoned off my life updating MySpace. Text blogs like this are okay so far.

I'm in a "simplification" mood, making my life less stressful, less complicated, less time consuming... so I can spend more time writing. I'm done with Book One of my dragon story and flipped back to "Shadowstrider." I want to finish Book 7 before the end of the summer so I can get started on Book 8 and have that done by next year. Then a rewrite of Book 9 and, oh yeah baby, on to Book Ten AT LAST! When I'm done, a re-re-readthru of all ten books, and it's off to the publisher. I refuse to publish until I know for a fact I can finish all ten of these books before I die.

Do you hear someone whispering the words "obsession?" Maybe it's just the tangerine orangutans sucking on my icy pops again.

Survey Galore

2008-04-10T01:47:00.000-07:00

Your IQ Is 135

Your Logical Intelligence is Exceptional

Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius

Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius

Your General Knowledge is Genius

A Quick and Dirty IQ Test

You Are a Total Brainiac

You’re amazingly brilliant. Some would even say genius.

You’re curious, thoughtful, analytical, and confident.

You take on difficult subjects because you want to... not because you have to.

No field of knowledge is too complicated or intimidating for you.

You’ve got the brains to do anything you want.

It’s possible you end up doing everything you want.

Are You a Brainiac?

Your Vocabulary Score: A

Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary!

You must be quite an erudite person.

How’s Your Vocabulary?

Your Love is Based on Commitment

You believe that love is something that develops and grows.

You don’t believe in love at first site, and you never mistake lust for love.

For you, love is about mutual devotion, respect, and understanding.

You don’t feel comfortable in a relationship, unless you’re both in it for the long run.

Why your love can last: You don’t take commitment lightly - or leave relationships easily

Why your love can fail: You’re so committed, you often can’t see the most obvious problems in your relationship

What Is Your Love Based On?

Your Love Quote

True love stories never have endings.

What Love Quote Suits You?

Your Love Song Is

Yellow by Coldplay

"Look at the stars,

Look how they shine for you,

And everything you do,

Yeah they were all yellow"

You’re so in love, it’s like a drug.

What Love Song Are You?

You Should Be a Teacher

You are patient, optimistic, and good at explaining things.

You work well with all types of people, and you are a good role model.

Success and positive outcomes are extremely important to you.

You are both a good leader and instructor. People look up to and depend on you.

You do best when you:

- Can see the results of your work

- Are able to teach someone a new skill

You would also be a good nurse or non fiction writer.

What Should You Be When You Grow Up?

You Should Be a Poet

You have a way with words... and a talent for drawing the pure emotions out of experiences.

Your poetry has the potential to make people laugh and cry at the same time. You just need to write it!

What Sort of Artist Should You Be?

You Should Be a Science Fiction Writer

Your ideas are very strange, and people often wonder what planet you’re from.

And while you may have some problems being "normal," you’ll have no problems writing sci-fi.

Whether it’s epic films, important novels, or vivid comics...

Your own little universe could leave an important mark on the world!

What Type of Writer Should You Be?

Arty Kid

Whether you were a drama freak or an emo poet, you definitely were expressive and unique.

You’re probably a little less weird these days - but even more talented!

Who Were You In High School?

You Should Learn French

C’est super! You appreciate the finer things in life... wine, art, cheese, love affairs.

You are definitely a Parisian at heart. You just need your tongue to catch up...

What Language Should You Learn?

You Are Guinness

You know beer well, and you’ll only drink the best beers in the world.

Watered down beers disgust you, as do the people who drink them.

When you drink, you tend to become a bit of a know it all - especially about subjects you don’t know well.

But your friends tolerate your drunken ways, because you introduce them to the best beers around.

What’s Your Beer Personality?

You Are Chardonnay

Fresh, spirited, and classic - you have many facets to your personality.

You can be sweet and light. Or deep and complex.

You have a little bit of something to offer everyone... no wonder you’re so popular.

Approachable and never smug, you are easy to get to know (and love!).

Deep down you are: Dependable and modest

Your partying style: Understated and polite

Your company is enjoyed best with: Cold or wild meat

What Kind of Wine Are You?

You Belong in the Silent Generation

You fit in best with people born between 1925 and 1942.

You are a person of high values and character.

Family, your country, loyalty, and hard work all important to you.

You are willing to do what’s right, even when it’s difficult.

What Generation Do You Belong In?

You Belong in 1964

You are a free spirit with a huge heart. Love, peace, and happiness rule - oh, and drugs too.

What Year Do You Belong In?

You Have Not Been Ruined by American Culture

You’re nothing like the typical American. In fact, you may not be American at all.

You have a broad view of the world, and you’re very well informed.

And while you certainly have been influenced by American culture (who hasn’t?), it’s not your primary influence.

You take a more global philosophy with your politics, taste, and life. And you’re always expanding and revising what you believe.

Has American Culture Ruined You?

You Are 70% "Average American"

You are average because you’ve known your best friend for at least ten years.

You are not average since you would pay to go in space.

How "Average American" Are You?

You Are 64% Weirdo

You’re a pretty weird soul, and you often can’t help but notice how strange you are.

You simply see things very differently. So you live your life in a very unusual way.

Who cares if you don’t fit in? Just remember to embrace your inner weirdo... because there’s no hiding it.

Are You A Weirdo?

There’s a 84% Chance You’ve Been Abducted By Aliens

You’ve almost certainly been abducted by aliens.

Either that, or you’re totally certifiably nuts.

What Are the Chances that You’ve Been Abducted by Aliens?

You Should Get A Butterfly Tattoo

Sweet and sassy

For you, tattoos are a thing of beauty - not toughness

What Tattoo Should You Get?

Your Pirate Name Is...

Iron Mistress of Death

What’s Your Pirate Name?

Orange County

You’re rich, pretty, and living a charmed life. (Or you seriously wish you were.)

From Disneyland to Laguna Beach, you’re all about living the California dream life.

Just make sure to marry rich - so you don’t have to work for it!

Where Does Your Inner Californian Belong?

White Chocolate Mocha Frappuccino

One of a kind and forward looking, you’re the first to introduce a wacky new trend to your friends. And even if your ideas seem weird, they get adopted pretty quickly.

What Flavor Frappuccino Are You?

Your 80s Theme Song Is:

Every Rose Has Its Thorn by Poison

What’s Your 80s Theme Song?

You’re a Pack Rat in Training

You know those crazy old people with a ton of video tapes and cats?

Well, you’re training to be one. Time to do some spring cleaning. Even if it isn’t spring!

Are You a Pack Rat?

Your Social Anxiety Level: 88%

You have extreme social anxiety.

Your social phobia is a serious problem for you, and you definitely need help.

And while getting help may seem very scary, it’s your only choice... except for hermitude!

Are You Socially Anxious?

The Part of You That No One Sees

You are balanced, peaceful, and sincere.

You’re the type of person who goes along to get along.

And you’re definitely afraid of rocking the boat.

Underneath it all, you fear your world falling apart.

You’ll put up with a situation that you don’t like in fear of changing it.

Disruptive and forceful people intimidate you - and sometimes exploit you.

What’s the Part of You That No One Sees?

You Are A Fig Tree

You are very independent and strong minded.

A hard worker when you want to be, you play hard too.

You are honest and loyal. You hate contradiction or arguments.

You love life, and you live for your friends, children, and animals.

A great sense of humor, artistic talent, and intelligence are all gifts you possess.

What’s Your Celtic Horoscope?

Your Power Bird is an Eagle

You are spiritual and able to soar to great heights.

You are a true inspiration, and many people look to you for guidance.

And you are quite demanding in relationships... but you’re worth it.

People know that you will become even greater than you imagine.

What’s Your Power Bird?

You Are a Mermaid

You are a total daydreamer, and people tend to think you’re flakier than you actually are.

While your head is often in the clouds, you’ll always come back to earth to help someone in need.

Beyond being a caring person, you are also very intelligent and rational.

You understand the connections of the universe better than almost anyone else.

What Mythological Creature Are You?

You Are Impressionism

You think the world is quite beautiful, especially if you look at it in new and interesting ways.

You tend to focus on color and movement in art.

For you, seeing the big picture is much more important than recording every little detail.

You can find inspiration anywhere... especially from nature.

What Art Movement Are You?

You Are Best Described By...

Impression, Sunrise

By Claude Monet

What Famous Work of Art Are You?

Your Inner Muse is Euterpe

You are most like this muse of music.

While you may or may not be musical...

You love music and set life to your own personal soundtrack.

And you are good at making anyone’s heart sing!

What Muse Are You?

You Are Psyche!

Eternally in search of purpose and insight.

You’re curious and creative with a total sense of wonder.

Totally empathetic, you pick up on other’s moods easily.

Just be sure to pamper yourself as well!

What Goddess Are You?

You Have Good Karma

In general, you like to do the right thing when it comes to others.

Your caring personality really shines through.

Sure, you have your moments of weakness - and occasionally act out.

But, all in all, you’re karma is good... even with those few dark spots.

How’s Your Karma?

You Were An Owl

You are stealthy and secretive - no one knows the true you.

You are a seeker of freedom, and you are comfortable with your dark side.

What Animal Were You In a Past Life?

Your Aura is Violet

Idealistic and thoughtful, you have the mind and ideas to change the world.

And you have the charisma of a great leader, even if you don’t always use it!

The purpose of your life: saying truths that other people dare not say

Famous purples include: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Susan B. Anthony

Careers for you to try: Political Activist, Inventor, Life Coach

What Color Is Your Aura?

Your Power Element is Water

Your power colors: blue and aqua

Your energy: deep

Your season: winter

Like the ocean, you evoke deep feelings and passion.

You have an emotional, sensitive, and spiritual soul.

A bit mysterious, you tend to be quiet when you are working out a problem.

You need your alone time, so that you can think and dream.

What’s Your Power Element?

You Are an Old Soul

You are an experienced soul who appreciates tradition.

Mellow and wise, you like to be with others but also to be alone.

Down to earth, you are sensible and impatient.

A creature of habit, it takes you a while to warm up to new people.

You hate injustice, and you’re very protective of family and friends

A bit demanding, you expect proper behavior from others.

Extremely independent you don’t mind living or being alone.

But when you find love, you tend to want marriage right away.

Souls you are most compatible with: Warrior Soul and Visionary Soul

What Kind of Soul Are You?

Ultimate Emo

2008-03-13T02:34:00.000-07:00

My husband and I were talking about ultimate emo sayings. He declared I won when we both burst out laughing at this:

"My life is a rose plucked from the grave of a loved one, sliced with a rusted knife, and scattered in the litter box of a diarrhetic cat."

Got a good emo phrase? Reply with your suggestions. Let’s laugh at their misery!

Go ahead, ask me about dragons!

2008-02-25T09:51:00.000-08:00

I've been working on Blue Fire Dragon for a while now. I have 22 chapters, which I think is very good progress, but now I'm getting into some heavy dragon lore sections.

What do they eat?
How do they breath fire?
What is their physiology?
Do they have spikes and horns?
How long do they live?
Are they telepathic?
Do dragons have two feet and a pair of wings/arms, or four feet and wings for a total of 6 appendages?
Do I want to go with Flight of Dragons where they eat limestone and Thor's Thimble lights the spark, or do I go with Reign of Fire and the dragon spits two chemicals that react together to make natural napalm?

Now, I could go the easy route and mimic past writers. While doing internet research, I have found that many people like the "Dragons of Pern" series. No, not "like;" they worship it! These people think they were dragonriders in another life. That shows a very talented writer, to have such a fanatic following. However, I'm decidedly avoiding reading any of those books until after I'm done with this novel. I'm restricting my reading to the classics and serious studies of dragon anatomy (if they really existed, they would have to be hollow boned, else they would never get off the ground, and the wingspan would be massive and involve huge wing muscles, leaving little physical room for the idea that they had four legs plus wings, and dragons themselves would be much smaller than the knights of yore claimed, frickin baggarts!)

I'm stretching out to a variety of cultures: Japanese, European, Russian, Middle Eastern, Egyptian, Babylonian. If they had a big lizard, I've read the legends. Wyverns, wyrms, drakes, ouroboros, amphipter, the lindworm, naga, cockatrice, basilisks, you name it!

After all this studying, I'm left with a dragon that I hope is unique, bit of a blend of numerous legends with my own twists. Kismet (my dragon) is a cute little guy right now, two swooped back horns on his head (for aerodynamics) with eye ridges (like eyebrows, but bone) and protective horns over his spit glands (two lumps on the corners of his mouth, as many dragons are described having). He has two legs and a pair of wings, a "wyvern" style apparently, but I was thinking a bit more like raptors with wings. For dang fierce chickens! I wanted to keep the physicality to a dinosaur style, and although my husband wants me to change it to four legs and wings, physically this works better. Something like a swan meets a bat and breeds with a lizard. Uh, yeah.

The fun part was coming up with a unique yet physically plausible way of flaming. Dragons in my story use a mix of gastrointestinal fumes (smelly burps) and the spit glands which ignite upon contact with oxygen and is intensified by the gas.

I'll scan in my concept drawing later. I'm no artist, but it helps me get an idea of what I want. Lots of playing around with the design.

Dune Inspirations

2008-02-12T16:09:00.000-08:00

I've drawn a total blank in writing Shadowstrider. I took a bit of a chance, thought I'd try my hand at a scene with a sort of James Bond feel to it. Actually, it's a bit more like "Splinter Cell" in the whole sneak in and don't get caught idea, not the suave libertine like Bond who comes in dressed to kill and introduces himself to every pretty girl in the room. Anyway, I decided to makes this the finale of Book Seven, got it set up real great, even wrote an outline, and I never use outlines. Then as I started up writing and... blank!!! Just blank. I haven't been able to write more than a couple paragraphs since the New Year.

I need some sort of escape from all the depressing crap going on in my family, so I've switched to a story I haven't worked on in years, a nice little dragon fantasy. I'm hoping it cheers me up and gets me through this block on my main project.

However, this story has heavy Middle Eastern influences. The setting is a desert planet, very Dune-esque. Most of the characters have Arabic, Jewish, or Persian names with a few African, Indian, Turkish, Albanian, Japanese, and even Swedish influences throughout. Things like food and fashion are all desert style, with abayas and salwar-kameez and dupattas and keffiyehs and eating baba ghanoush and drinking qawah. Very fun to write.

Now my husband is wondering why the hell I'm looking up all this Arabic information. He raises an eyebrow every time I start mentioning about Islam and various beliefs and traditions I find interesting and try incorporating into the story. He's worried that too much obvious Middle Eastern themes will hurt the book by drawing heating attacks, both from the Muslim community who may think I'm mocking them, and from Muslim haters who will think I'm a terrorist supporter or something. I'm left wondering why I can't give a nod to Frank Herbert without it becoming a political issue.

I may post an excerpt in a couple days. One thing about my story that goes against the "traditional" dragon lore yet follows the more modern assumptions about dragon physicality: my dragons are vegans! Wohoo!!!

Writing Advice for the Creatively Inept, Part II

2007-11-25T05:43:00.000-08:00

I decided to continue with this series because I see so much bad writing out there, browsing through excerpts from fellow Nanowrimo competitors. Please read more advice here.

Continuing on:

Seven, to avoid the revisions your editor will give you anyway, proofread your own work for weaknesses. Look for passive tense (remember E-Prime from Part I?)

A good hint at finding where your work might need strengthened is to simply do a search for the word "There" at the beginning of sentences. Set your Find&Replace to match case, and see how many times you start a sentence with that weak word. Chances are, it will also be a passive phrase. Same for "It." I give a 90% chance that you will look at all the sentences beginning with "There" and "It" and think to yourself "What the hell was that about?" Explain "It."

"There was a loud noise. It woke me up." This weak line can easily be spruced up to "A crashing sound in the driveway set the neighbor's dogs barking and forced me away from sweet dreams of kissing Sue."

I also go through and replace "was" just by habit. Not 100% removal, as I would if I followed E-Prime, but enough to seek out weaknesses. "It was cold" is a sentence first graders learn. Write like you at least attended high school! "The frost bit my nose like an angry cat and decorated my windows with Winter's lacy undergarments." Wohoo, see how you can make things sound great? It's so easy.

Eight, and here's a tough one... keep dialog free and flowing. Unless your character is a vampire from the 12th century and speaks very formal for a reason, chances are your character will be an average joe who uses slang and incomplete sentences. "I couldn't make it to the store. Damn Walmart. Always open my ass."

In a creative writing class, my fellow students severely criticized me because one of my characters didn't cuss enough. I thought they were nutters (I rarely cuss) until I read through the story years later and realized they were right. For the girl's personality, her use of profanity should be extreme to an almost comical level. I still don't like cussing, but I invent characters who are not necessarily reflections of myself.

Nine, make your characters so distinct in their speech, either with phrases they overuse, accents, or just by the way they present their opinions, their tone of voice and manners, that during long dialog passages you can avoid "he said/she said." I hate those. Read Section Three for more. At the very least, get creative. Come on, how many of us talk so dull in our lives that we simply "say" something? We gasp, shout, vent, whisper, expound, yip, tattle, tantalize, leer, jeer, peer. Avoid "he said" by telling us what he did.

"Never!" John's words echoed through the empty hall.
"Sorry, mate," Bill shrugged casually.
"I will never give in to you." His hand swiped out so hard it broke the vase. "I thought you were my friend."
"Just a messanger, y'know."
"You'll have to fight me."
"Look, mate, I ain't fightin' no one."
"Fight! I know you can!"
"Eh, it ain't my choice, y'know."
"Fight me, you coward!"
"Coward what now? Mate, I'm just here to tell you, y'know. It ain't nuttin' personal."
"You're all bastards, every one of you. You're all alike."
"Maybe so, mate, but I don't wanna kill you."
"Coward!"

Can you tell John from Bill? Of course you can! Anger on one side, aloof nonchalance on the other, a bit of an accent, that's all it takes. Make me see your dialog like a movie in my head.

Ten, and for this I will use alliteration to emphasize my point ... ahem ... please, people, punctuate properly. Thank you, thank you!

Seriously, though, punctuation goes inside quotes. I can't tell you how many emails I get that say, "It's a joke", he said, "get it"?

OMG people, did you drop out of 3rd grade? If you write like this, please do not shoot yourself when your editor turns you down after skimming the first page. Then again, if you write that bad, maybe you should voluntarily cleanse the gene pool. I have a revolver under the bed for you to use!

The only time I can think of offhand (and it's bloody early, so don't kill me on this) is when you use quotes outside of dialog. Example: What did John mean by "It'll be exciting"?

Of course, ideally you should use italics, but that's all I can come up with. Otherwise, quote are like condoms, they wrap around to protect. You don't want to catch a communicative disease, you know.

Happy writing, and rewriting, and rewriting....

Thanksgiving Idiot

2007-11-23T16:00:00.000-08:00

I wasn't going to post about this, but I figured it's a good lesson to everyone out there. Learn from my idiocy!

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and dinner was at my place. My hubby's uncle said he was coming at 4pm, and I know his family tends to eat early. Now, I learned a thing or two about etiquette, including how to set a formal table, how to fold napkins into interesting designs, and how to time all your cooking so that everything is hot and ready when your guests arrive. I turned off the stove, put everything on the table, and was ready to go two minutes before 4. Then Matt's uncle was an hour late. Then he decided he wasn't hungry and wanted to watch a movie. So we watched Fantastic 4 since he hadn't seen it. By the time it was over, it was 7:30 and dinner was icy. So I decided to toss it all in the stove and warm it real quick, that way it doesn't have that microwaved dryness about it (dry turkey, yuck!)

My logic was, the stove had been off 3.5 hours, it was cool (no heat when I opened it), so I just grabbed the casserole dishes and turkey pan and tossed them all in at once. No gloves, no mitts.

Folks, I don't care if that stove has been off all frickin' day, put a glove on!!!

Typical, I was in a hurry, and my hand hit the top grill of the stove. Ouch, hot, no pain, kept loading. It wasn't until I finished putting the dishes in there and started the stove up that I looked to see how bad the burn was.

Still no pain ... because there was no skin!

It looks a lot better today. Just to gross you all out and show you to always ALWAYS be careful, I should have snapped a picture of just how nasty that burn looked.

My index finger isn't too bad, some melted skin and a blister. My ring finger was spared injury by hitting the stove with my wedding ring (the stone was big enough to deflect it, don't worry, the ring is not damaged). However, my middle finger has a long gash like I got attacked by a Doberman, and about three centimeters of that is burned through the dermis, deep and white! That means 3rd degree. It's small, so I'm not going to the hospital unless it continues to be a problem, but you can see the different skin layers as the burn moves out. There was also a long section of melted skin that just fell off eventually. Yeah, nasty.

I ran cold water, but it didn't hurt, so idiot me figures I'll be fine, and I have a guest to entertain. I put Neosporin on it and a band-aid and just waved it off with a laugh. But then...

Y'know, I burned myself this bad once before. I should have known it was coming. Still, it's a shock when a part of your body which feels fine at the moment suddenly feels like it has been submerged into a vat of liquid metal. There I was, trying to keep conversation going and cut my turkey, when all my brain knows is the fires of Hell and they are concentrated into my left hand straight into my middle finger like I'm whoring Satan's mistress or something. I excused myself, hid an icepack in my lap napkin, and avoided anything I couldn't eat one-handed. Once dinner was over - almost crying by now - I ran to my bedroom, took the strongest painkiller I could find, and fell asleep with an icepack sitting on my hand unsuccessfully attempting to quench the flames.

Moral of the story: never assume a stove is cold. Always examine burns as soon as they happen. Even if there is no pain, keep that cold water running on it. And most important, entertaining your hubby's uncle is not as important as caring for a 3rd degree burn.

Thought for the day:

If your motto is "Live and Learn," prepare to have 911 on speed-dial.

Writing Advice for the Creatively Inept

2007-11-14T09:33:00.000-08:00

People often ask what advice I can give them to help promote their writing career. The following assumes you know how to write. These are ways to take that short story or novel an clean it up.

One: beware the verb "to be." Learn to eradicate it whenever possible. Don't become anal about it, though. I mean, we don't want to exterminate "to be" from the English language. Just realize this world contains a plethora of descriptive verbs waiting for us writers to manipulate them like tools. Using "to be" tempts a writer to fall back into lazy styles: simple words, writing without thought, and the dreaded passive voice. The next thing you know, your work sounds like an eighth grader typed it up while using meth. Passive tense haunts me, and I constantly fight the urge.

How do you prevent this habit? By using something you probably never leaned in high school: E-Prime. It forces writers to really think about what words we use. Often, we write simply to get words out of our heads before the concept vanishes. In moments like that, we forget what we learned in school and go barbaric, chaotic. E-Prime forces us back into a study of words. Just try it. Take a short story or poem and go psycho with E-Prime. Give the proverbial birdie to Shakespeare's "to be or not to be." Be creative! I bet the weaknesses in your work will jump at you like monkeys at a banana-scented tourist.

Two, for god's sake, people, learn to establish and stick to a verb tense. I had a college professor who pointed this out to me rather harshly, in front of the whole class, then spent the rest of the night going over basic grammar because obviously none of us knew anything and we were all as juvenile as 2nd graders. You think middle school kids can be cruel, imagine a forum filled with college students glaring at you because you made some taboo mistake and now they ALL are paying by the most hideously boring class in the history of college-dom. I've never made the mistake again. Don't suddenly say "They went to the fair, but he forgets his glasses." Went implies past, they already visited that fair, like yesterday, or last century. Forgets implies present. See the clash? In a creative writing class, they called me the Tense Terror and Grammar Goblin because I jumped on peoples' cases about keeping stories in the proper verb tense. It's easy to break the habit and it will improve the quality of your writing ten fold. Congrats, you now write like an 8th grader is SUPPOSE to!!!

Three, even if it's just dialog, make it descriptive. He said/she said grows boring after a page or two. Use a thesaurus if you must, but make the audience see your characters' faces. I imagine I'm a director and I want these actors to really understand the character in that moment.

1) "I can't believe it," he said. --- boooring
2) "I can't believe it," he cried out in disbelief. --- eh, getting there
3) His eyes opened wide as his mouth unhinged, as if opening it wider would allow him to ingest the wonder before him, or at the least vomit it back up into something resembling logic. "I can't believe it," he muttered numbly, not caring if it sounded so cliche that he would have been jeered out of a drama class.

You got the idea? Dialog is not the time for writers to take a creative break. Yes, there are times when the punchy, fast jabs back and forth work for showing the wit between two characters, but eventually your reader will imagine two spotlighted characters on a propless stage, not an heiress to a kingdom who turns into a unicorn.

Four, make all events in the story relevant. I have a problem with this, merely because I write a great part, then forget what happened. Please, don't spend five chapters writing an awesome scene, only to have it so disjunct that you could scrap it and it won't change the book one bit. Your universe! Make it meaningful and fun.

Five, write your synopsis way in advance. Now, I'm one to write outlines and then throw them out the window, but at least know sort of what you want to do. Otherwise (and yes, this happened to me too) you get this awesome first five chapters, then hit a brick wall. What is the hero supposed to do with his stolen dragon egg? Nurrr... I dunno... Story gets shelved, byebye idea.

Six, realize you will likely write the beginning last, so don't sweat it. If you can totally visualize sections, feel free to write them out and keep the notes all together. Work out a character sheet. Yeah, sort of D&D, but it totally helps. What color of eyes? (I learned that when my character went through 3 eye colors and two hair colors). Does he have hobbies? Can you work that in? Strengths? Weakness? All main characters have weaknesses. Even Superman did, right? It makes them believable.

Well, I can think of many other things that make the difference between okay writing and something that will have the NY Times screaming in bold caps, "RIVITING!" but, I don't want to write much more or I'll never get back to my nanowrimo novel. I'll leave you with this final bit of writing advice that works wonders. To quote Mark Twain: "Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."

Happy writing!

Help for the Anxiety Prone

2007-11-12T07:28:00.000-08:00

I wrote this to a person seeking help for chronic anxiety disorder, and I thought, well, everyone panics at some point, I should post this. Maybe it'll help someone out there.

I have agoraphobia so I know right where you're at. I've done the psycho-treatments and they didn't help. I did the pills and hated them. I tried yoga and hurt myself. I learned that if I wanted to beat this, it was up to me, not some shrink telling me "write down your dreams" and crap.

First, look at what you can do to your environment to simply relax. Get some Native American flute music, play an Enya CD, cut out alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, and other stimulants and go to herbal teas, particularly mint and lavender. A detox diet honestly does wonders. And there are so many herbs out there that you can pick yourself, or if you're a city girl like me, you can buy them cheap. I've found lavender to take a load of stress off my day. It's cheap at Trader Joe's and other such stores, smells amazing, and tastes delicious. I have lavender bundles in the bathroom, lavender pillow spray for the bedroom, I love cooking lavender and lemon chicken, and I add lavender to my teas. Or find other aromas that soothe you. Maybe vanilla or sage or cedar, whatever works. I totally suggest lavender and mint tea every morning sweetened with honey. It'll help your stomach. We all know how stress screws your digestive system.

Next, take a moment each day for meditation. Not necessarily odd positions and "ohm" chants, but just sit in a comfortable chair or lay in bed and be quiet for a few minutes, whatever you can spare. Think of the one place you love to be, maybe the beach or mountains, somewhere peaceful. Visualization is a powerful tool in psychiatry. Really put yourself in that place, imagining it so vividly that you can feel the air and smell the breeze. Absolutely forbid yourself from thinking of stressful things.

Next, give yourself a mantra of peace. This is one I'm still working on for my anxiety issues. After you've done the soft music and herbs, if you still feel that horrible nervousness creeping in, tell yourself out loud so you hear the words: "I love to be at peace. I refuse to give into fear." Make up whatever you want, but make it a firm declaration, you are not going to let this anxiety get the best of you.

Doesn't work and still feel tense? I learned this from a stress management professor. If you feel the panic attack starting up, start at your toes and tense them, then relax. Then your calves, tensed, relaxed, then thighs, stomach, arms, chest, neck, face. Tense up for five seconds, then relax for five seconds. One, you're doing the counting thing. Two, you're forcing adrenalin into those muscles that are struggling with the fight-or-flight of the panic attack, and the release phase sends endorphins into your system which will relax your muscles. Three, you're paying attention to your whole body so you will not hyperventilate. Four, you are consciously telling your body "stop, deal with this, tense up if you must, but then relax." I learned about this five years ago and it works wonders. Also works great just before bed if you can't sleep.

St. Augustine: Quantum Measurement in the Making?

2007-10-09T01:21:00.000-07:00

While doing Shadowstrider research, this time on quantum measurement and the troubles therein (i.e. Schrödinger's Cat), I came across this. Although not the research I was aiming to find, it brings up hypotheses that are geared toward my character's personality and how she would analyze the given situation.

In other words, instead of sounding like I'm writing straight from a physics book (which I've been accused of on occasion) I decided to have Ahaovathea take a more existential POV concerning Time ("time is a protraction of the mind") rather than her mother's POV, which definitely follows a more literal scientific definition.

The only area where I imagine her thinking differently is St. Augustine's theory that "temporal existence is taken to be equivalent to 'being in the present.'" As a Native American, I think Ahaovathea would definitely disagree with both that and the theory that past and future, in a sense, do not exist at all. Although this is a main focus on this treaty, it is one point my character would certainly not agree upon.

My research and wonderful discussions with Native Americans have showed one constant perception that is so different from "Western" thought: Time is fluid, alive, past and future are living things, and the present moment is a knife's edge dividing the two. The Hopi believe that life is filled with things either manifest (thus belonging to the past) or coming into manifestation (and thus categorized as future). A house, tree, memory, etc. exist and are manifest, but hopes, dreams, and expectations are things of the future.

If the future did not exist, does this also mean our dreams do not exist? And yet we have dreams, which proves the existence (even if existentially) that there is a living future out there.

So in that sense, St. Augustine (as is common among European-influenced cultures) veers far from the indigenous respect for Time. Instead of acknowledging the existence of these two major temporal forces, he brushes past and future off as inconsequential.

However, the end result is the same as if you took Ahaovathea's ideas. Time is a protraction of the mind, but St. Augustine's conclusion negates the inclusion that the mind could protrude into past and future.

Like tentacles on an octopus, we reach out in all directions and grasp the world around us. We reach into the world, and we are the world. We reach into Time, and we are Time.

Any comments to debate this temporal issue are encouraged. I love debating the mechanics of Time and hearing the ideas of others. I've flipflopped views on Time, destiny, and choice throughout Shadowstrider, allowing the different members of the family to express unique POVs.

[St. Augustine's treatment of time occurs in the eleventh book of the Confessions, and is connected to his investigation of the opening words of Genesis.]

1. There's no sense in asking what God did before creation because time itself is a creature. God, as for Boethius, is in eternal present. Hence, God precedes all things, including time, ontologically but not temporally.

2. Time seems something we all know well; however, upon further analysis it turns out to be something we barely understand. Some say its the motion of the heavens. But this cannot be right because:

if motion of heavens stops but a potter's wheel spins, could it not turn faster or slower? Moreover, scripture tells us that the sun stopped and yet time went on;
by time we measure the motion of bodies, and so that of the heavens.

3. The issue is so complicated that if no one asks me what time is, I know; if one asks me, I do not know. And yet, we can say a few things:

if nothing passed away, no past; if nothing were coming, no future; if nothing were, no present;
the past doesn't exist anymore; the future doesn't exist yet; the present must be transient, from future to past (otherwise it would be eternity), and it cannot be extended, otherwise it would overlap with past and future.

NOTES:
- Time, then, involves a flux from future through present to past.
- Temporal existence is taken to be equivalent to "being in the present."
- The treatment of the lack of extension of the present is identical to Aristotle's.

4. The non-existence of past and future and the restriction of existence to an extensionless present are seemingly incompatible with two activities we engage in every time: relating the past (and foretelling the future), and measuring time.

Relating the past and foretelling the future are not possible because what is not (past and future) cannot be related or foretold.
Measuring time is not possible because:

5. Augustine's solution:

Hence, time is a protraction of the mind: the future is expectation, the present enduring consideration, and the past memory.
But why is measuring representations (instead of the things represented) a solution? Cannot all the arguments about things be reproposed about representations of things? The answer is that a long past is not a "long memory of the past" in the sense that it's a memory which lasts a long time, but an (instantaneous?) memory of a long past (that is, temporal length is not a formal feature of the memory, but an intentional feature of it).

Where were you?

2007-09-11T10:17:00.000-07:00

Where were you?

This question used to apply to Kennedy. Everyone knew where they were the day JFK was assassinated. Whether you believe is was a mass conspiracy or a lone gunman, it was an event that shook our nature and reshaped the fabric of our culture.

Now we face a new milestone. It was not just the death toll of those four planes and their devastating effects. It's not just the war on terror and its lasting effects. Whether you are pro-war, pro-peace, or prosaically indifferent to the whole thing, whether you are American, Mexican, Canadian, Japanese, British, Muslim, Buddhist, or even French (insert obligatory sneer, followed by politically correct "just kidding"), September 11, 2001 is a day that shook this world.

Those terrorists wanted something visual, and they got it! The site of those massive buildings falling, of the Pentagon in flames, of the atrocious loss of life on that Pennsylvania field, was a horror now ingrained into the human psyche. Centuries from now, children will read about this day as the first move in events that will shape the 21st Century. Millenniums will pass, and the story of the Two Towers (don't perk up so excitedly, Tolkien fans) will be recited around campfires, a story considered a myth, but an enduring one, like the Tower of Babel or the fall of Jericho.

So I ask you: where were you on 9/11?

I had gone to college early that morning. I had just finished a boring stint studying in the math lab. I noticed more than the usual amount of people on the computers looking up what I assumed was political news. Images of President Bush and views of New York. Odd for a math lab.

I finished early and decided to call up my then-boyfriend/now-husband to see if he could meet me for an early lunch. Matt sounded terrified, asking if I was alright. I was casually walking down the steps of the science/math building, thinking what a lovely day it was (ironic, because it was about to become dark). As I walked down, he frantically explained, "It's World War III out there! They've destroyed the World Trade Center, blew it up with airplanes, and they hit the Pentagon too. We're at WAR!!!"

Odd, but the news of the attack on the Pentagon hit me worse at that moment. The mind focuses on what it can grasp. Blowing of the WTC? That was something out of Hollywood. I imagined maybe a gapping hole, not that they were actually destroyed. But the Pentagon? A symbol of military prowess! How?

I stopped dead in my tracks, whispered "What?" in disbelief, and grabbed hold of the sprawling steps' handrail, barely able to keep hold of the phone as Matt gave me what few details were known for a certainty.

I looked around at the people around me. It was as if I had been blind just a moment before.

Lovely day???

I suddenly saw huddles of young women walking through the hallways, holding onto each other as they cried. I saw an 18-year-old Freshman walking like wood, his eyes strained, his jaw tight to hold in the anger and numbed horror. And there were some still walking to and fro to class, blissfully unaware, laughing and fooling around as college students should, blind, as I had been blind, to the gnashing and weeping filling the campus.

I vividly recall seeing a young Muslim woman sitting on her prayer rug on the Quad grass, she and a group of other Muslims joined together for daily prayer, now busy listening to a radio in gapping disbelief (this was, of course, before the words radical Muslims and the racial fear associated with it ever entered our innocent minds, a time when seeing Muslims praying in the Quad was not a deal at all). I remember she was shouting, "They are cowards, who do this! Cowards!" At the time, there was no clue who might have pulled off such a terrorist act.

Matt rushed to the school to pick me up, insisting I not go to anymore of my classes. I protested at first, but when I saw the images on TV, school was the last thing on my mind. Matt lived near John Wayne Airport, and the roaring sound of incoming and outgoing planes was usual, hardly even noticed after a while. On that day, the skies were silent, which added to the odd solemness. I called my mom, and she did not want me to take the bus back home. Even at that point, there was a fear toward public transportation. My parents would go on to drive me to school for the next week, fearing a bus bomb.

I did go to school the next day, a Wednesday. I had a light schedule, but I had band class that night. i remember sitting with the other French hornists, discussing what we saw on the TV, how the planes turned to the side for maximum damage, about where Flight 93 might have been heading, wondering still who might have orchestrated it all (if you remember, Osama bin Laden denied any involvement for years, and to this day the FBI admits he is still only a suspect, albeit a rather believable scapegoat).

The following days were numbed. I knew no victims, but I knew some people living in NYC at the time who saw the whole thing play out in too-real horror. Matt's cousin lived mere blocks away from the World Trade Center. A WTC employee my sister frequently corresponded with for work was killed. Plus there was the whole bus-bomb scare, and that was my sole means of transportation. The ripples of that day are still felt six years later, and will likely continue to affect us throughout our lives.

So, that's my story. That's where I was on that day, walking down the steps exiting the math lab, happy at such a beautiful morning. And into that stereotypical optimism and ignorance, the spear of hatred was thrust. Still, although some may toss spears and arrows of hate and fear at us, Godly love, respect, and honor shall prevail.

The Volcano

2007-07-01T04:33:00.000-07:00

I was riding through Portland a couple days ago with my folks. It was a lovely clear day, so as we crossed Marquam Bridge, I was able to point out both Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens to them. It's rare enough to see Mt. Hood with all the clouds we usually have, but even on clear days St Helens is hard to see. It's rare indeed to see it so pristine! But it was a lovely cloudless day ... except for the cloud coming from St. Helens! I didn't take this picture, but this is almost exactly what I saw, snow and all.

I've only seen the volcano 2-3 other times and never on an active day. It's actually a little unnerving! I know it's only steam, but it makes you think about what could happen ... and what did happen back in 1980.

Around here, 27 years have not really dimmed the memories of the native Oregonians. They still have their stories of the day the volcano blew. Then they glance over to "our volcano," Mt. Hood, the two looking at each other like giant siblings glaring down through the ages, and you can see in their eyes a wondering "what if" driving an old fear into them.

Not My Week

2007-06-30T19:40:00.000-07:00

Ever have "one of those days"? Well, I've been having one of those weeks.

First, my parents are visiting, which is usually cool, I like my folks, but they have two Pomeranians now. I'm allergic to dogs, and these two are as poofy as they get. They want to do all sorts of shopping while up here in Oregon so they don't have to pay taxes. They've already bought an electric grill, a toaster, some tools, a cargo attachment for their RV, and a laptop for my little sister. That's some major money! I hate shopping, just ain't my thing, but my hubby's working, so I have to show them around. And my parents takes the dogs everywhere they go. And dogs love me! They like to get up right into my face, and one, Kissmo, gives me licks, sending me into sneeze fits. If I touch them to push them aside, my hands start itching madly. But I'm not going to complain when my mother has spent over $200 already on blouses and some very nice dresses that I would never have bothered buying on my own. So, shopping isn't my thing, and the dogs bug me, but okay, I'll deal!

But then, as I was walking around with my dad, I hit a pothole or something, started to fall toward a truck (not cool). Luckily, I caught myself on a street sign before getting run over, but I sprained my ankle and reinjured my knee (which has never really healed), plus in the process of catching myself I sprained my wrist and broke my finger. So now I'm limping and I have a metal splint on my right index finger, and I'm right handed, so my life just got 60% harder to do simple tasks. Working on the computer in general is now tough. Try working a mouse some day with your index finger bulked up and sticking straight out, clicking with your middle and ring fingers. Not fun.

Today, my hubby and I had the day off with my folks staying in the RV enjoying the rain. We decided to try a new Asian restaurant called Hot Plate. The food was good, but while I was eating the sweet'n'sour soup (soup of all things) my tooth that has been needing fixed for ... well, too long (hush now, I have a reason to hate dentists, I'm deathly allergic to all numbing stuff, so dental work is unpleasant, to say the least) ... anyway, the tooth broke, right there at the table. I sudden felt a crack, reached back with my tongue, and it's wobbly like a six-year-old. Just broke off, all I had to do was pull it out and put a napkin up there for a couple seconds, hardly bled at all. Now my mouth hurts, and the front part of my tooth feels like it wants to break too ... and the pain is shooting up my nose, which makes me sneeze ... and I'm on my period, so all you women know how sneezing on your period is just not fun.

So I'm limping, toting a broken finger around in a metal splint, my mouth swollen, my gut bloated, cramping up a storm, and riding around town with my folks, shopping which I hate doing, with their dogs which I'm allergic to, and my dad keeps forgetting to take his happy pills so he's acting like a grumpy old man arguing with my mom about everything until they really do sound like an old couple.

Oh, and did I mention my cat is having a kitty crisis? He's fallen in love with our neighbor's cute little Persian - who, by the way, hates his feline guts - so now he mopes around, hates us, scratches and bites a lot more, and he jets toward the door if he even thinks he hears it opening. He's not allowed outside, especially not with Fluffy out there giving him disdainful looks, so when he does sneak out I have to chase him down before the neighbor's dogs scare him up a tree... limping... cramping... with a broken finger... and sneezing from dog danger and broken tooth pain.

It's just not my week!

It Ain't Enya

2007-06-29T16:37:00.000-07:00

There are many songs out there that claim to be Enya... but aren't. Maybe it's a synth lover who thinks the only way they'll get exposure is to claim to be someone famous. Maybe it's a 12-year-old screwing around on mommy's computer and doesn't know the name of the song they just downloaded. Or maybe it's some idiot college kid who hears something and says "oo, oo, I know, that's New Age, so it's gotta be that chick, wutzername, Enya!"

Who knows how it really starts, but at some point someone puts the wrong artist on there. Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond are often mixed too, so it's not just obscure artists. Suddenly, Enya fans see a song they've never heard of before, pay their 10 cents or whatever, only to find... it ain't Enya.

Lots of people know I love Celtic music, so I often get these random "ever heard of [insert artist]?" which, of course, I've probably never heard of, and it sends me rummaging through Amazon or Download.com for some samples of this newly discovered person. I like that. I discovered Anahata that way.

Other times, I get "I have a song I bet you don't have" and low and behold, I don't have it. Nor did the artist ever make it! Many do that claiming an Enya song I don't own (I have all her albums, but she releases some songs only on singles, and I don't have all those, but I WANT THEM!) Their claim often turns out to be Loreena McKennitt or Lisa Gerrard or Enya's older siblings in Clannad, all of whom I also love, although I like Clannad's older music better than the new pop-folk stuff they're doing.

Off on a tangent! Okay, so a year ago when Enya's new album Amarantine came out, someone asked if I had the "Amarantine Promo." I was like, sure, you mean Comb of the Winds... No, no, not the single, I mean the Promo. Like Monsoon Chariot. Monsoon what? I've never heard of that. Where can I buy that? Oh, it's not in stores, it's bootlegged, internet only, mysterious 13th track, only in Russia or something.

So I risk the wrath of the RIAA and (hush now) I download these "Enya promos." Sure enough, I've never heard of them. One is titled Amarantine, but it's a fast, heavily percussive song that builds intensity upon one word, "Angelica," even more intense than Enya's other driving song, The River Sings, certainly nothing like the happy, sleepy, optimist "Amarantine, Amarantine" of the album song. In fact, some of these aren't Enya-ish at all. Some plain out aren't Enya. One's a man! I did not download them all, only a few, but I had a problem. Here were some apocryphal songs, maybe-but-most-likely-not by Enya, and I had no clue who really did them. And I was growing to really like them!!!

Now, when it comes to my music, I'm a perfectionist. I want all the info inputted properly. If it's off my own collections, no problem, but it's harder if it's from a friend who made a CD of songs they thought I'd like (which is not pirating, it's the same thing we did back in the '80s with tapes and it was legal!) That music doesn't always have the info to transfer over. I'll spend hours searching for the right album, what year, what track number, who wrote the song, a picture of the front of the album. Yes, I obsess a little!

So now I have songs I like, don't want to get rid of them, and they're not the right artist, possibly not even the right name of the song. So off I go, digging into the arcana of Enya forums, hunting out for "songs not by Enya." There are plenty of gripers ranting about the difference between Loreena, Lisa, Moire, and Enya, complaining about a new generation of Celtic and New Age musicians masking their songs as Enya, but not much for who actually did these songs. Mostly, they have guesses. It might be him, it's possibly her, admitting many of these are not unknown artists trying to break out, but famous artists people just ignorantly mistook for being Enya. While I'm racking up demerits from the RIAA, I checked these possible songs against the promo songs. Nothing like it at all!

This is a list of the false-Enya songs on the "Amaratine Promo," who did them, and I added links so you can check out the album on Amazon. Support the artists! Or at least spread the word about them.

[UPDATE]

I've updated the original list, thanks to a bunch of people jumping in and filling in the blanks. You guys are awesome!

01 Amarantine - actually Angelica, artist Seay, album 1 Voice (2005)
02 Remember Now, artist 2002, album The Emerald Way (2006)
03 World of Wonders, artist Cora O'Donovan (Freud), album A Woman's Voice (2001)
04 Fading Hues – actually Longing for Ashira, artist Enam, album M'anchelii (2001)
05 Caeli et Terra - actually Sanctus, artist Anael, album Unconditional (1998)
06 Dragonfly, actually In the Hollows of Trees, artist Gary Stadler & Singh Kaur, album Fairy NightSongs
07 Mor Rioghain - actually Siren Song, artist Seay, album 1 Voice (2005)
08 Along Meadow Streams - unknown
09 Arcadia, artist Miriam Stockley, album Miriam (1999)
10 Cagaran Gaolach - unknown
11 In the Arms of Eternity, artist Die Sektor, album To Be Fed Upon (2006)
12 Iapetus - actually Mystery, artist Lorellei, album Spiritus - Breath of Life (1996)
13 Monsoon Chariot, actually Still, artist Seay, album 1 Voice (2005)

Okay, so that's the list, a bit more detailed than anything in the Enya forums, if I may brag. But there are still songs I want to know about.

Along Meadow Streams – this song is listed in the "false album" listing in the Enya forum, but not in the long list of false songs. So is it a real Enya song? If so, where can it be found? I can't find it on Amazon or elsewhere.

Cagaran Gaolach – claimed to be Mary Jane Lamond, album Bho Thir Nan Croabh, but definitely not her. For the sake of future music lovers, I'd like to know who did it.

If you downloaded these songs, do everyone a favor and rename them to "false Enya" or something. Please give credit where it's due. And if you realize, "hey, I have that song and I LIKE IT," please check out the artist who really did it. You just might want to buy the album.

Bill Guffey - Requiescat in pace

2007-06-08T07:48:00.000-07:00

I happened to do a Google search for an old friend of mine, Mr. Bill Guffey, only to find he passed away two months ago. This is truly heartbreaking to me, mostly because I didn't have a chance to say goodbye.

William "BG" Guffey was the original keyboardist in the band Shooting Star, which was the first American band to sign onto Virgin Records. I met him online around 2001 while playing the MMORPG called Utopia. He went by the name Nicolai, and I happened to guess that his reference was to Nicolai Hel of the novel Shibumi. He guessed my online name, Rhov, was a shortened version of Rhovanion of Tolkein's Middle Earth. We were both literature nerds!

That began many years of witty conversations, enjoying his vast knowledge (he was a member of Mensa and truly brilliant). He liked that I understood obscure cultural references and I actually read Tom Robbins... and enjoyed it! We were leaders in our Utopia game, both of us serving as Monarch for a time, both always the lead magical characters in our kingdom, planning elaborate attacks in the middle of the night. The "Nic and Rhov combo t/m strike" could not be beat! We made lots of friends in those years. I learned about his musical past, which intrigued me, being a musician too. He told me about his family and the son he loved more than anything in the world. He sent me photos of family gatherings, and after a few years it was like I knew them all. He told me much about his personal life, which I could write novels on! The man really lived it up! Weird how online friendships can be so close!

We both stopped playing Utopia at about the same time, but we still kept in touch. Then, about two years ago, shortly after I got married, BG caught me on AIM and told me he was moving away and might not be able to chat anymore. He was going to Europe to pursue a dream. I was proud of him. He had been quite sick over the years, and I felt he deserved rest and happiness. I emailed him a few more times after that, heard some news, but then he never replied. I was busy with being a wife, so our friendship just drifted. Little did I know his trouble with his liver was getting the better of him.

Now, this morning, I caught his obituary on Dan Martin's site. I'm simply stunned. I'm listening to Shooting Star's ballad "Sweet Elatia," my personal favorite. BG never did figure out what Elatia was a reference to, if it was just based from the word "elate" or if it had a deeper meaning; it was something he never thought about until I asked him. It's such a beautiful song. Shooting Star fans notoriously ignore the group's ballads, but for me they are highlights of the albums. I like "Elatia" for the sailing references (I love sailing) and that it's just so peaceful. I honestly could "lay back, let go, close my eyes, and just sail on." I'm also listening to BG's wild keyboard pounding in "Last Chance." He would tell me stories about his days as "the King," getting crazy with the band guys, wooing the women, but how he was so shy to go on stage, the band had to get him totally drunk. It was a rule, there must be a beer sitting on Mr. Guffey's keyboard, that way he could stay buzzed through a concert and be able to face the crowds.

I think back to stories he had, of missing Woodstock to chase after a girl, of seeing the Beatles in concert, of meeting Elton John and many other great performers, of playing with bands all over the Midwest, and many escapades of his that I can't mention for legal reasons. Mostly he talked about his son. Little Billy was his life, and he was so proud of him, bragged about him so much that I ended up knowing this boy as if we had grown up together.

That was Bill Guffey, a devoted father, a lover of music and fine literature, a brilliant man hiding behind that shaggy head of hair. Although our friendship was internet-based, he eventually became one of my best friends. He even inspire one of my characters in the Shadowstrider series. BG thought it a laugh that the character K.J. is a "long-haired man from the Midwest."

BG... you will be deeply missed by friends, by family, and by fans.

William "BG" Guffey, "The King" - 1952-2007

No, I'm not a born saint,
Can't change the course of time,
Can't perform magic,
Can't step into your walk of life.
...
We're just people, people in life.
Together, together we survive.
Give your hand, I'll give you mine.
Don't be scared to take it.
We're here for such a short, short time.

I wanted to show you, I want you to know
That I really care about the hardships you've known.
I want to say believe me, you're not alone.
You're not alone!

Cause we're all in this together.
We're all in this together.
Reach out for a friend
Cause in the end
We're just people,
Just friends.
Just people...
Just friends!

The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills

2007-04-02T14:26:00.000-07:00

If any of you read The Wheel of Time series, you'll have caught the title reference right away. If not... go to a bookstore and buy Robert Jordan's books, starting with The Eye of the World. They are really well worth it.

It's been a while since I've sat down to actually read. Weird, I know, since I'm a writer and a bookworm. But there is a fine line a writer must walk, a choice to be made: to read or to write. Now, when I start reading, I'll sit for three or four hours at a time, totally absorbed, all life coming to an abrupt caesura as my whole being is swept into a fantasy world. Maybe that's why I prefer fiction; I like escape. Similarly, when I start writing, I can slip away for days, weeks, yes even months. I sleep, but only as long as I need to think clearly enough to see the keyboard. I eat, but at the computer. Earl Grey is my companion. These two existences cannot easily coexist. Either I am in my book, or in someone else's. Too much time and energy is placed in both activities to multitask it.

When I was in high school and college, writing like this was impossible. Short stories has to suffice. Poetry was what got me through my cravings. Something I could sit down for an hour and finish, feeling fulfilled, accomplished, and yet yearning to return - one day - to that great story that has already consumed seventeen years of my life.

I am what some people consider unemployed. I like to think of it as freelancing. I work, don't get me wrong. I work long, hard hours, sitting at a desk and doing research, typing until I have to soak my fingers in hot water. This, right now, is a break from research. I've been looking up info on the M79 Grenade Launcher. Why? Because it is mentioned in the story, and I want to squeeze it into a few niches. Why again? I dunno, 'cause it's cool? As my main character says: "Do not ask why, just know that it is."

My "freelancing" is not just to sit on my rump and write, please don't think that. I have agoraphobia and rheum-arthritis, which makes employment difficult. Some days (like today) the flareups are so bad I can't do anything. My right hand is dead today. Typing one-handed is hard work. I can't walk much further than the kitchen. I hurt... everywhere! Employment in a 9-5 is impossible in this state. Here at home, I can write, or at least do research. I can try to do something. With no "other" job to distract me, I can focus on what I really want to work on, my career passion: my writing. That is my true joy, my ambrosia to drink up and fill me with sweet belletristic ecstasy.

But these flareups are hitting more frequent. The medicines just aren't helping. Thus, I chose an alternative treatment: Robert Jordan. The Wheel of Time takes me away from the pains in my body and places me in characters, be it Rand or Mat or Perrin or Egwene. So many characters to step into, explore, see their world as I try to forget my own. They have pains, yes, and mental anguishes I could never fathom, but it's easier to cope with the afflictions of the characters in my head than with my own aches and anguishes, with swollen joints and fingers that won't straighten, with panic attacks at the stupidest things that leave me embarrassed and frustrated and wanting to scream aloud. When the drugs bring no relief, it's easier to escape.

Reading takes me away from writing, of course, but right now I can't write much. I stop every other sentence to rub out wrists, feeling the bones within pop and crunch in complaint. I chide myself for trying stubbornly to use the right hand that is curled like the dying branches of some ancient oak. Writing on days like this is torture. Yet I know, if it were not for the books to read, I would press on. Why? "Do not ask why, just know that it is." Honestly why: because I'm a stubborn-ass perfectionist who is terrified I won't get to finish the story.

Not being fatalistic or anything, I've just always seen unfinished works as the ultimate tragedy, especially when critics claim the work is an artist's masterpiece. So great... and not complete. I think of Frank Herbert. Surely, Chapterhouse could not be the ending he wanted. I think of Tolkien and the Silmarilion, not to mention the plethora of notes he left behind, to be taken up by his son in hopes of finishing the complex universe his brilliant father created. I think of Kafka, Hemingway, Lord Byron, Chaucer, Spencer and the Faerie Queen, Dickens and who the heck killed Edwin Drood, Schubert and the Unfinished Symphony, Bach and The Art Of Fugue, John Lennon and Free As A Bird (ok, so the remained Beatles finished it, but who's to say if that was Lennon's vision for the song). Unfinished works are one of the ultimate tragedies for me, yet I suppose every artist, be they writer, musician, architect, or painter, eventually succumbs to Azrael's arms with something left unfinished.

Robert Jordan (aka James Rigney), I hope, does not fall victim to this fate. With one more book to go until he finishes the Wheel series, Mr. Rigney has been diagnosed with amyloidosis. Not that I know a bloody thing about the disease, but I know it is fatal. Not just for the sake of personally wanting to see the loose ends tied up, but for the sake of future projects such a creative man surely must have planned in his boundless mind, and for his family and friends, and for the man himself, from one aspiring author to one well established and esteemed, I hope he beats this disease. Write if it makes you happy, Mr. Rigney, but rest up and get well!

Ah, but the Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills. My own story reflects such concepts of fate, a theory I personally am not certain about. Fate, many believe, will deal what cards are meant. Robati, the Road of Time (that's what I call it in Shadowstrider, and I'm tickled pink that Jordan calls it the Wheel of Time, so similar)... the Road of Time takes us on our path, and we walk its route. Can we defy fate? Fate, or the disease at least, states that this author, who I have just discovered and yet instantly feel an affinity toward, is destined for a lifespan of 4 years. Perhaps Mr. Rigney is ta'veren and will pull his string in the weave the way he wants.

Oh, I could quote phrases from his books, from my books, from a hundred other stories out there that deal with such topics. I won't. Only because Robati has set me on a path meeting a bottle of Motrin and some pain killers. I'll return to reading Jordan's books... and I will enjoy the escape.

Corned Beef And Cabbage

2007-03-17T00:48:00.000-07:00

Corned beef and cabbage. Even if you have no clue what "corned" beef is (hint: it has nothing to do with corn on the cob), the imagination is instantly tuned into redheads drinking Guinness and Bushmills. Could there be anything more Irish? Why, in 2006, when St. Patrick's Day landed on a Friday during Lent (no meat is to be consumed that day), the debate of whether to follow Lent or follow the tradition of eating corned beef split American dioceses. St. Patty, corned beef, soda bread and shamrocks: nothing screams "Irish" more loudly.

Really?

And what if I told you that corned beef it not a traditional Irish meal?

Lies! Heresy! But all too true.

First off, there is no such thing as a "traditional" St. Patrick's Day meal. This feast day in honor of Saint Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, the man who went from slave to bishop to famous converter of Ireland, has no particular meal associated with it, although anything of Irish origin is encouraged, like soda bread, Baileys, Guinness, Harps, Bushmills.... Notice alcohol plays a big part? Hey, it's Ireland! In any case, a usual feast meal in Ireland would consist of Irish bacon, not corned beef.

The meal of corned beef and cabbage is an American invention. Irish immigrants in New York City's Lower East Side wanted something similar to the Irish bacon they were used to consuming for St. Patty's Day. Their Jewish neighbors told them about corned beef, which was cheaper and still good. So Irish-Americans turned away from tradition and used this beef substitute. It gained popularity, and as more Irish immigrants came, corned beef and cabbage became a staple of any Irish menu.

Boy, my Granka must be rolling in her grave at that! She swore on corned beef and cabbage, refused to eat anything else on St. Patty's! It'd be unpatriotic! The most "Irish" meal in the world!

Then again, she wore Orange for St. Patty's. Her family were Protestant Irish, and she took to the whole "orange and the green" fighting thing seriously. She wasn't religious herself, she purely wanted to walk into an Irish pub wearing orange to start a brawl so she could smash a few Catholic heads, or any heads, whatever their religion. Yep, Granka was quite an interesting woman.

Éireann go Brách

Book 9 DONE

2007-02-07T02:43:00.000-08:00

As of now, my first draft of Book Nine, Shadowstrider: Reiekooadu (yes, such a weird name is explained and highly significant) is FINISHED!!!!

Party time, Party time!!!

If it weren't 2-frickin-AM-in-the-morning I would bring out the whiskey and celebrate. As it is, I'm celebrating by getting some well-deserved rest.

Now... on to Book Ten.... eventually... blah!

If you actually read this blog, you'll ask "Book 9? What happened to Book 7?" Yeah, that was the plan. I finished Book 6 Homefront back in August, sent it to my husband to do a quick grammar check, and he got to my lovely ending, the one I thought was so great, and went "That's it?!?!" He then proceeded to spend a dinner at Sheri's convincing me I needed to expand on two somewhat major characters who just don't get much conclusive development by the end of Book 6. So he convinced me to write a Book 7 and 8, yet to be titled. I didn't want to fuss with that while I'm in the middle of Reiekooadu, so they got skipped. I'll be writing Book 10, tentatively called Final Destinies, finish that, then go back to those two.

A little personal record, I started work on this novel in mid August (I had an outline of it since 2003, but had to finish the previous books first). That means I've been writing this for just slightly under 6 months.

The first draft clocks in at 718 pages!

718 pages in 6 months. That's a new record for me. I have NEVER written ANYTHING so furiously in my life. And I totally followed nothing of my original outline. In fact, I went so far off course, I have to scrap Book 10's outline altogether. That's normal. I hate outlines; I never follow them. They're good to get a general idea out, but I never keep to anything.

Anyway, this means I averaged 4 pages each day. Of course, I don't work on typing this every day. I spend weeks sometimes researching stupid stuff (like last week was spent researching how to tan badger pelts totally natural, without chemicals or anything, and I got into the whole lore of tanning techniques, including a concept called "braining" which, obviously, uses the brains of the animal to soften the pelt and make it shiny. Let's just say, it's a chapter you do not want to read while eating.)

I don't know when was the last time you tried writing a 4-page essay in 1 day (or if you ever tried such a thing), but that's tough work. Record speed for me. Most of my books take a few years to finish. Book 1 took me seven years (I was in school, I had no time to write). Book 3 took me two years (college, same excuse). A few years for a novel is normal. Not bloody 6 months.

If I can keep this pace, I'll have this series finished and ready to resubmit to publishers in two years. YAY!

Wait... 2 years... writing 4 pages a day... every bloody day...

GAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Storm Front '07

2007-01-19T14:33:00.000-08:00

Doesn't the title of this entry reflect the grotesque sensationalism of TV news? Back in California, it sprinkles a little, and they flash "Flood Watch 2007!!!" Gimme a break! Part of the reason why I don't watch the news anymore.

Anyway, we've had our first real winter storm a few days ago. At first, it was just bloody cold. There's a creek just outside our apartment, and we've been watching it for a while, wondering when it would freeze. Monday I think, Matt left for work, then came running back in shouting "It finally froze!" We got pictures, but the night pix Matt took of the fountain turned out the best. It looks surreal!

Finally, the clouds came back, and with them came the snow. I was up extra early that morning, and I like to look out my window (sort of like math class, you know), when I noticed in the pre-morning dark that there was a lightness not usual to the ivy planter outside my window. Snow! I took some pix, just in case it melted, just to prove it did snow. I didn't have to worry. By that afternoon, there was a good 4 inches, and it's still snowing off and on.

For Matt, it was only the second time he's ever seen it snowing (the first time was last month), and it surprised me when he confessed it was also his first time actually walking in snow (the flurries last month totally don't count) and he was worried about driving in it. But he did good, no accidents, only a little slippery in the parking lot.

His work closed early, so he came home eager to play in the snow. He was like a kid!

We got into a snowball fight.

Then we managed to scrap enough snow together in our little planter to make a miniature snowman we named Doc Brown, because the pine needles I stuck as hair look like Doc of Back to the Future.

It's warming up now, a whoping 38 degrees, just enough to make everything slushy. Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Doc Brown says: "Stay warm and well wishes to all my friends!"

Why the French Hate the English

2006-12-02T12:12:00.000-08:00

I was born in North America, raised speaking solely English, but with knowledge of eight other languages: Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Yiddish, and just starting on Gaelic. I majored in English in college with a focus on creative writing. I have studied Middle and Old English and ventured into the extremely difficult realm of inventing my own fully-functional language. I have read novels in English (Old, Middle, and Modern), Spanish, and German; and I've written some of my own.

Therefore, it is without arrogance that I claim I have more authority to hate this perplexing language than your average yo-dawg-whassup English speaker!

English is an evolving language, living and growing. It is made up from numerous languages, a melting pot of global glottals. However, after centuries of formation and evolution, it has found itself trapped in a printed-press world of Oxford absolutes and English professors with too much training in Latin.

Latin is a dead language, yet grammarians attempt to stuff our lovely, living language into the rotting corpse of Latin's rules. I would like to hastily identify split infinitives as one of these rules which simply does not make sense in our language. One of the joys of English is we CAN split our infinitives; therefore, let us revel in our uniqueness!

English is not just Latin! English is Germanic; English is Asian; English is Arabic, English is African! Therefore, our rules should not come solely from Latin.

Ebonics is simply an ethnolect, useful in the advancement of all languages (many Yiddish terms are in our language today thanks to such ethnolects) but still not a language in of itself as some claimed.

1337 is a cipher, useful in new spellings, thinking outside the dictionary-box, but it went chaotically awry and tumbled into anarchy at the fingertips of twelve-year-old haX0rz.

The Internet itself is a medium of free thinking that has been abused. Now, it is a juggernaut of horrendous spelling errors and punctuation anomalies (I am anal about punctuation after a professor humiliated me for it, and people who write "hi". with that damn period after the quotes annoy me to death). At times, it can be so bad as to cause pretentious lip-curling even from those who haven't read a book since Huck Finn was crammed down their throats only to be regurgitated.

My favorite Internet spelling error: "Earn Continuing Education Units Thourgh the AER Web Site!" What irony! Now, the word we know as "through" honestly is a metathetic of the Middle English "thourgh," but no one has used that spelling in over a thousand years! Certainly, it is not acceptable today, not in school exams, not in novels, not in esteemed websites, and not if you're going for CEUs! Unless AER is trying to start a ME trend or something.

Ye olde revolucion!

Umm... okay, enough English geek History of Languages crap. My point is this: the Internet is a cesspool of errors, but it is also helping people to realize that language does not have to be languid.

I feel there will be a time when English will adjust, cast off old rules, have a spelling-bee-revolution, accept "drive-thru" and "donut" as proper spellings, and stop harassing Trekkies for saying "to boldly go!"

Until that vernacular revolution, we are stuck with a great language with rules that make no sense whatsoever. Grammar is stodgily touted; changes in spelling to adapt our language into the 21st Century have been stubbornly denied. I give as example the same juxtaposition all 2nd Grade teachers give: "do" and "go."

Which brings me to the reason for this posting (all that above is just me ranting):

I found this poem in a joke site years back and have loved it since. Recently (as in this morning), out of sheer curiosity about who wrote this poem, I looked up about its history. It was written by a teacher of the English language in Haarlem, Holland, a man by the name of G. Nolst Trenité. Trenité wrote under the pen name "Charivarious," including a booklet entitled Drop Your English Accent from which this poem was taken.

Oh, and it's entitled The Chaos. Love it!

Another website also says this about the poem: "Multinational personnel at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters near Paris found English to be an easy language ... until they tried to pronounce it. To help them discard an array of accents, the verses below were devised. After trying them, a Frenchman said he'd prefer six months at hard labor to reading six lines aloud."

Anyway... Chaos indeed! Halfway through, even my brain starts to melt. An enduring example of why the English language needs to be updated!

We shall call it English 4.0!

See if you can read all the way through... properly!

The Chaos
- by G. Nolst Trenité

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.

Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it's written).
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say-said, pay-paid, laid but plaid.

Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,
But be careful how you speak,
Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak ,

Previous, precious, fuchsia, via
Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;
Woven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.

Say, expecting fraud and trickery:
Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,
Branch, ranch, measles, topsails, aisles,
Missiles, similes, reviles.

Wholly, holly, signal, signing,
Same, examining, but mining,
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far.

From "desire": desirable-admirable from "admire",
Lumber, plumber, bier, but brier,
Topsham, brougham, renown, but known,
Knowledge, done, lone, gone, none, tone,

One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel.
Gertrude, German, wind and wind,
Beau, kind, kindred, queue, mankind,

Tortoise, turquoise, chamois-leather,
Reading, Reading, heathen, heather.
This phonetic labyrinth
Gives moss, gross, brook, brooch, ninth, plinth.

Have you ever yet endeavoured
To pronounce revered and severed,
Demon, lemon, ghoul, foul, soul,
Peter, petrol and patrol?

Billet does not end like ballet;
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.

Banquet is not nearly parquet,
Which exactly rhymes with khaki.
Discount, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward,

Ricocheted and crocheting, croquet?
Right! Your pronunciation's OK.
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Is your r correct in higher?
Keats asserts it rhymes Thalia.
Hugh, but hug, and hood, but hoot,
Buoyant, minute, but minute.

Say abscission with precision,
Now: position and transition;
Would it tally with my rhyme
If I mentioned paradigm?

Twopence, threepence, tease are easy,
But cease, crease, grease and greasy?
Cornice, nice, valise, revise,
Rabies, but lullabies.

Of such puzzling words as nauseous,
Rhyming well with cautious, tortious,
You'll envelop lists, I hope,
In a linen envelope.

Would you like some more? You'll have it!
Affidavit, David, davit.
To abjure, to perjure. Sheik
Does not sound like Czech but ache.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, loch, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed but vowed.

Mark the difference, moreover,
Between mover, plover, Dover.
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice,

Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, penal, and canal,
Wait, surmise, plait, promise, pal,

Suit, suite, ruin. Circuit, conduit
Rhyme with "shirk it" and "beyond it",
But it is not hard to tell
Why it's pall, mall, but Pall Mall.

Muscle, muscular, gaol, iron,
Timber, climber, bullion, lion,
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor,

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
Has the a of drachm and hammer.
Pussy, hussy and possess,
Desert, but desert, address.

Golf, wolf, countenance, lieutenants
Hoist in lieu of flags left pennants.
Courier, courtier, tomb, bomb, comb,
Cow, but Cowper, some and home.

"Solder, soldier! Blood is thicker",
Quoth he, "than liqueur or liquor",
Making, it is sad but true,
In bravado, much ado.

Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Pilot, pivot, gaunt, but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand and grant.

Arsenic, specific, scenic,
Relic, rhetoric, hygienic.
Gooseberry, goose, and close, but close,
Paradise, rise, rose, and dose.

Say inveigh, neigh, but inveigle,
Make the latter rhyme with eagle.
Mind! Meandering but mean,
Valentine and magazine.

And I bet you, dear, a penny,
You say mani-(fold) like many,
Which is wrong. Say rapier, pier,
Tier (one who ties), but tier.

Arch, archangel; pray, does erring
Rhyme with herring or with stirring?
Prison, bison, treasure trove,
Treason, hover, cover, cove,

Perseverance, severance. Ribald
Rhymes (but piebald doesn't) with nibbled.
Phaeton, paean, gnat, ghat, gnaw,
Lien, psychic, shone, bone, pshaw.

Don't be down, my own, but rough it,
And distinguish buffet, buffet;
Brood, stood, roof, rook, school, wool, boon,
Worcester, Boleyn, to impugn.

Say in sounds correct and sterling
Hearse, hear, hearken, year and yearling.
Evil, devil, mezzotint,
Mind the z! (A gentle hint.)

Now you need not pay attention
To such sounds as I don't mention,
Sounds like pores, pause, pours and paws,
Rhyming with the pronoun yours;

Nor are proper names included,
Though I often heard, as you did,
Funny rhymes to unicorn,
Yes, you know them, Vaughan and Strachan.

No, my maiden, coy and comely,
I don't want to speak of Cholmondeley.
No. Yet Froude compared with proud
Is no better than McLeod.

But mind trivial and vial,
Tripod, menial, denial,
Troll and trolley, realm and ream,
Schedule, mischief, schism, and scheme.

Argil, gill, Argyll, gill. Surely
May be made to rhyme with Raleigh,
But you're not supposed to say
Piquet rhymes with sobriquet.

Had this invalid invalid
Worthless documents? How pallid,
How uncouth he, couchant, looked,
When for Portsmouth I had booked!

Zeus, Thebes, Thales, Aphrodite,
Paramour, enamoured, flighty,
Episodes, antipodes,
Acquiesce, and obsequies.

Please don't monkey with the geyser,
Don't peel 'taters with my razor,
Rather say in accents pure:
Nature, stature and mature.

Pious, impious, limb, climb, glumly,
Worsted, worsted, crumbly, dumbly,
Conquer, conquest, vase, phase, fan,
Wan, sedan and artisan.

The th will surely trouble you
More than r, ch or w.
Say then these phonetic gems:
Thomas, thyme, Theresa, Thames.

Thompson, Chatham, Waltham, Streatham,
There are more but I forget 'em-
Wait! I've got it: Anthony,
Lighten your anxiety.

The archaic word albeit
Does not rhyme with eight-you see it;
With and forthwith, one has voice,
One has not, you make your choice.

Shoes, goes, does *. Now first say: finger;
Then say: singer, ginger, linger.
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, age,

Hero, heron, query, very,
Parry, tarry fury, bury,
Dost, lost, post, and doth, cloth, loth,
Job, Job, blossom, bosom, oath.

Faugh, oppugnant, keen oppugners,
Bowing, bowing, banjo-tuners
Holm you know, but noes, canoes,
Puisne, truism, use, to use?

Though the difference seems little,
We say actual, but victual,
Seat, sweat, chaste, caste, Leigh, eight, height,
Put, nut, granite, and unite.

Reefer does not rhyme with deafer,
Feoffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Dull, bull, Geoffrey, George, ate, late,
Hint, pint, senate, but sedate.

Gaelic, Arabic, pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific;
Tour, but our, dour, succour, four,
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.

Say manoeuvre, yacht and vomit,
Next omit, which differs from it
Bona fide, alibi
Gyrate, dowry and awry.

Sea, idea, guinea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean,
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion with battalion,
Rally with ally; yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, key, quay!

Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, receiver.
Never guess-it is not safe,
We say calves, valves, half, but Ralf.

Starry, granary, canary,
Crevice, but device, and eyrie,
Face, but preface, then grimace,
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.

Bass, large, target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, oust, joust, and scour, but scourging;
Ear, but earn; and ere and tear
Do not rhyme with here but heir.

Mind the o of off and often
Which may be pronounced as orphan,
With the sound of saw and sauce;
Also soft, lost, cloth and cross.

Pudding, puddle, putting. Putting?
Yes: at golf it rhymes with shutting.
Respite, spite, consent, resent.
Liable, but Parliament.

Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew, Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, clerk and jerk,
Asp, grasp, wasp, demesne, cork, work.

A of valour, vapid vapour,
S of news (compare newspaper),
G of gibbet, gibbon, gist,
I of antichrist and grist,

Differ like diverse and divers,
Rivers, strivers, shivers, fivers.
Once, but nonce, toll, doll, but roll,
Polish, Polish, poll and poll.

Pronunciation-think of Psyche!-
Is a paling, stout and spiky.
Won't it make you lose your wits
Writing groats and saying "grits"?

It's a dark abyss or tunnel
Strewn with stones like rowlock, gunwale,
Islington, and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Don't you think so, reader, rather,
Saying lather, bather, father?
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, bough, cough, hough, sough, tough??

Hiccough has the sound of sup...
My advice is: GIVE IT UP!

First Year

2006-11-05T21:26:00.000-08:00

I'm a little late at posting about our 1-year anniversary, but technically I'm still on vacation until Thursday.

Rather typical, plans did not turn out as expected. We had this great plan to spend the week at the beach followed by a trip to the Columbia Gorge and see Multnomah Falls.

Well, we slept in (no snickering laughs, you!) and I decided, why not see the Gorge that day since it's only half an hour away. So we left behind the suitcase and drove beyond Portland into the beautiful Columbia Gorge. If you ever come up here, you must experience this drive.

We got to Multnomah Falls, which Matt had never seen but I've been to once. It's the second tallest perennial fall in the US, and you can see it from I-84, really amazing! It's romantic, watching the waterfall and standing on Benson footbridge that crosses the pool which separates the first fall from the second. Lots of people get married on this footbridge. It's very romantic if you can ignore all the tourists.

Well, then we decide, let's take the one-mile hike to the top of the falls. We're young, we've marched Hollywood Christmas Parade for crying out loud, we can do a one-mile hike.

(Can you hear the ominous thunderclap yet?)

Well, this trail is not at all difficult. It's made for tourists, paved good, well kept, has benches at the halfway point, offers some great views, but it is quite steep. If you're in fair shape, it's doable. Tourists travel it all the time, even little kids. However, Matt is a self-proclaimed "mouse potato" and I badly injured my knee two years ago. I didn't think anything of it. I mean, that was years ago, right?

(Surely you hear the ominous thunderclap now!)

So, we made it to the top. You really can't see over the edge, but you can see where the water dumps over, and "Little Mulnomah" Falls just before the big drop. Being the adventurous idiot I am, I kept going off the trails (ignoring signs all over not to do such a thing) and I was just about to jump over the railing and peek right over the edge of that waterfall. Luckily, I have a strong husband who knows me too well. He would not let me hop the railing. Boo on him, but it was probably a good thing.

Then... came walking down the trail. No more than a hundred yards of that sharp decline, and I feel a stabbing at my knee, then the quick instinctual reaction of muscles tightening around inflamed tendons, making the whole joint stiffen. We jokes about needing a ranger to helicopter me out, and just pushed on. The more we went, the worse the pain got. Soon, I couldn't bend my knee at all. It was on fire! Matt was holding on to me because I kept losing balance.

And then I heard the pop!

*cue ominous thunderclap!!!!*

I knew that sound too well, ingrained in my memory from the injury I took at work in 2004. A loud pop, loud enough for others around me to hear, a pain in the knee, then everything seems okay... until you take a step forward. It happened two years ago, and it happened again. I waited for the initial pain to go away, then tried taking a step. And then I nearly fell.

There was no way I could go on, we were still 3/4 of a mile away, and it was almost night. Well, Matt wasn't about to leave me alone on the trail, we had no clue who we could call (plus we were so far out, our cell phones probably wouldn't have worked), and I was being my usual stubborn-ass self, so I pushed on.

30 degree grade, night quickly making everything dark, bugs coming out for the night (and a snake which I almost stepped on), no more tourists on the trail, and I'm holding onto Matt, putting almost my whole weight on this poor boy who hadn't done any hiking since he was a boyscout, whose idea of a workout is walking across the street to the pub.

Well, I'm sure you've seen enough movies to know how this turned out. Me hobbling, barely able to put any weight on my left leg, yet having no other choice but keep going, Matt realizing he had muscles he never knew existed, darkness all around, forest noises creeping us out. What was supposed to be a simple one-mile trail took us almost a full five hours to finish. We got back to the car some time after eight. We went to a nice restaurant, enjoyed the rest of the night, got back home, and crashed!

Next morning comes... and so does the pull brunt of the pain. Matt's muscles wage a rebellion, my knee refuses to bend, Ibuprofen becomes more holy than the Shroud, and out comes the booze to dull the pain. A jug of rum and a few beers later, we're both hobbling like a bunch of old fogies. No way we can make it to the beach, nor do we have any desire to do anything besides rest and sleep.

And that was our anniversary, romantic and painful, but not in any S&M way. We're still recovering. Matt seems to be walking better, but my knee is pretty bad off. I can't go see a doctor, because I'm not on Matt's insurance yet and we have no money. So I keep it heated and iced, Matt waits on me, I get to lay around and read.

Wait a minute.... this has turned out to be a pretty damn good anniversary after all!!!!

Here are some pictures we took.

The view from across the highway. I wonder how many truckers even notice it's there.

As best of the entire height as I could get. It's VERY tall.

Here I am!

Handsome!

Matt said my hair looked like a waterfall.

Looking down from the footbridge at the secondary falls.

We had some great views of the Columbia Gorge on the way up.

There were signs everywhere not to go off the path. When do I ever follow directions But lookie what I found. Purdy!

This is the first of the three falls, at the very top of the big falls. Matt was getting creative with time lapse and stuff.

Looking down from the very very top of the falls. You really can't see OVER it, not without climbing out of the observation deck (which I nearly did and Matt stopped me, he was worried I'd slip) so I just reached out as far as I could with the camera and snapped.

The two of us at the top lookout. Notice I'm already taking pressure off my left leg.

It was very late by the time we got down, but Matt still wanted to take some pictures. I think this was the halfway marker or something, since there's still some gloaming light. It's really weird how the water seems to light up at night, considering there are no lights around, not even on the trail, which was very frightening, I'll tell ya!

NaNoWriMo

2006-11-01T10:42:00.000-08:00

November blows in with crisp, autumnal aromas and the sound of a thousand novelists furiously tapping away at keyboards across the world.

It's that time of year again: NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month.

I'm not blogging much about this event, because my fingers are nearly bleeding from all the typing I've done over the past week. All I'll say is I'm working hard to make that 50,000 word deadline, and I have a horrendous case of writer's block at the moment (thus the blogging). Both me and my sister have entered. We'll see if either one of us finishes.

Pirate's Last Meal

2006-09-19T05:23:00.000-07:00

Want some grub and grog to feed yer hearties that's pirate-themed? Here's a little somethin' I've cooked many a time, and everyone loves it.

What ye be needin':

Some form of meat, soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, brown sugar, lime juice, pepper, a big plastic ziplock bag to mix it all in, and of course RUM!

First off mateys, forget measureage. You're a pirate! Pirates don't have cute little measuring spoons! We dump in however much we want. So dump in lots of soy sauce and worch... worshe... worchest... whose-chest? YARRRR! Lots of that good stuff. It should fill an inch or two of the baggie.

Then dump a bit o' brown sugar in there, not too much, half a cup or so, enough to make it like wet sand... wet sand on the salty beaches of a Caribbean island! Arrr....

Then dump rum in there, maybe a jigger's worth, smartly now, no wasting the grog! Squeeze a lime wedge, or get those bottles with lime juice and squirt some in there. Then shake enough pepper to taste but not too much to make you sneeze. Freshly ground pepper is best, but we're pirates, we don't have the pleasure of gettin' the finer things in life. Shake that baggie up. It should be like quicksand, avast!

Toss in what vituals ye want. I likes me deshelled shrimp, but it can be chicken too if'n ye wants. Whatever pleases yer fancy.

Zip it nice and tight and let the meat soak in the marinade for an hour in a cool spot, like down in the dank corners of the bilge, but ye can use the refrigerator. Then flip the bag and soak another hour. You're getting the flavor of pirate-musk in there, not something to rush.

When the meat is nice and flavorful, take it out of the baggie and grill it up good and hot. No raw meat now, mateys! Get sick from the rockin' of the ship, not the cookin'.

You can serve it with whatever be to yer liking. I like to serve it with a side of brown rice with pineapples. Pineapples really enhance that erotic... I mean exotic flavor.

Exotic, you know, like palm trees swaying and a three-masted schooner anchored offshore, sipping your mai tai as you watch the sea gulls fly by.

Speaking of mai tai, the grog is important too. Vituals must have the right grog. Rum, of course! You can serve something fancy-like (mai tai, daiquiri, pina colada) or be simple and just have a rum and coke. Or just rum! If you're one of them landlubber teatottler sort, no worries matey, the rum in the meat cooks out, no alcohol there, just flavor, and you can down it with some pineapple juice if it pleases ye.

So that's my recipe. Simple because it's adjustable. You can toss other spices into the marinade, like cayenne and ginger and other fancy-like things, but we're pirates! When did you last hear a pirate complain that he's out of ginger? Arrrr!

This is what I use, simple and savory. Savvy?

Rock the Angels, Trumpet Man

2006-08-23T09:33:00.000-07:00

Rock the angels, trumpet man!

Maynard Ferguson
(May 4, 1928 - August 23, 2006)

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

My first exposure to Maynard Ferguson was high school jazz band. We played Birdland, MacArthur Park, Chameleon, Gospel John, and others. Mr. Pergola played for us his Maynard records. Our trumpeters' eyes just bugged! The rest of us were left in serious awe. Since then, that screaming trumpet has tickled my ears and boggled my mind, but always made me smile with teenage memories.

My band director, Mike Pergola, passed away last year, and to lose such a mentor and a music legend so close together is sad. The world has lost a beautiful voice, but I know future musicians will hear Maynard Ferguson and be in awe just as I was when Mr. Pergola opened my mind to a new stratosphere of sound.

Hear that? It's opportunity marching away....

2006-08-17T01:55:00.000-07:00

I'm bummed at the moment.

A local band called The Online Romance messaged me through Myspace and said they're looking for a French hornist for some recording sessions and wanted me to join them. I was like HELL YES!!!!! then... wait, dammitall, I got rid of my horn! Waaaaaaaaaaaaah! I've been so majorly down all night, now.

I like their sound too, very much the Northwest Indie sound (think The Decemberists). And I would LOVE to record! That would be so frickin awesome, total dream come true, you know!

But it had to be on the French horn, which I gave back to my college in May. Broke my heart to see the thing go, too! I had to tell them, sowwy, no hornie...

Wait, that sounded REALLY WRONG!

I didn't tell them that, honest! I said I'd love to, I like their sound, but I have no French horn of my own (I did not say "horny", honest!) but I have a mellophone and a trombone and a trumpet, so if they ever needed those I am SO there!

Chance #2 of becoming a recording musician, flushed down the drain.... :/

Okay, that's my sob story for the night.

Book 6 DONE!

2006-08-14T05:38:00.000-07:00

Completed. Finished.

AT LAST!!!!

The 6th book of my series is all finished, clocking in at 521 pages. One monster of a thing to write, too. Not the length. It's actually one of the shorter book (hey, I JUST finished it!) It was just... I dunno, too many factors that I hadn't planned on, tangents I did not anticipate, and once I was near being finished, I realized I had loose ends I left dangling. So I've actually gone through this book three times with massive revisions.

I know I'm going to have to go back in there and straighten it out a bit, fix grammar and stuff, but the plot, the dialog, it is all DONE!

And I am please. I was actually laughing as I reread the last third of it, a part I had written months back, but forgot about as I fixed the middle section. Little jokes, innuendos, things I totally forgot about suddenly come back, and I laughed reading them again. That's I good sign, I hope.

Most importantly, I am satisfied with the ending. That almost never happens. I usually screw off the ending, or write it months beforehand so that it doesn't fit with the whole developed plotline. This time, it fits the rest of the plot, it has a recurrent phrase in it which ties it to the other 5 books, and it ends with a bit of a metaphor, which made me warm and tingly to realize I even did something like that.

And I'm rambling to all you who have no clue what I'm writing. Let it suffice to all of you: IT IS DONE!

I now wait for my brain to get over the cerebral overload, maybe have a private party to celebrate this milestone (drinking can help kills those hyperactive brain cells), and then I plough into the last two books. These have been waiting patiently for 3 years, waiting for books 3-6 to be completed before I finished them. Now the groundwork is laid out, the final two books can finally take their shape.

But first.... I have GOT to get some sleep!!!

They Say It's Your Birthday

2006-08-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

Rocking out to Beatles right now, looking at all the pretty pictures in my comments. Thank you, everyone (early, on time or late).

So... one year older (and deeper in debt). I feel no different. In fact, I had to ask my husband how old I was. 26? 27? 28?

Honestly, you don't pay attention to your age after 21. Up to then, you can't wait to be older, to be 16 and drive, 18 and legal, 21 and drink. After that great initiation of inebriating yourself into adulthood, age is of no further concern. There are no special perks of reaching 25, or 27, or even 29.

Thirty is another issue. At thirty, you enter a new phase in your life, that "thirtysomething" decade where the rebellious stupidity of teenage years and the laid-back optimism of your twenties is replaced with something heavier, a mortality which does not reached most people until then.

I'm not ready for that phase yet. Me and my mortality are good friends, but I don't like to visit him often. I'll let that association simmer another three years.

For now... wow, 27. So flat sounding. That's like asking someone where they went for vacation and they answer "Delaware." You reply with "oh, cool" and think what a lousy place to be.

But 27 isn't all too bad. You're not 30 and feeling aged, you're not 21 and wondering what all the fuss was about, it's just a damn beer! You're at a youthful point in your life where things are more settled, life is wonderful, maybe there's a special person in your life... or maybe you're having fun looking for them. For me, I have a loving husband, a caring family, wonderful friends, supporting associates, and I STILL WANT A KITTY!!!

Doesn't look like I'll be getting one for my birthday, either.

Indie-visible

2006-03-13T22:16:00.001-08:00

Okay, I admit, I live in a cave.

I had never even heard the word "indie" until I started reading Questionable Content (which, btw, I found totally by accident on some weird random internet research, no clue what, but it had something to do with the notorious unreliability of Wikipedia).

Now, thanks to Martin and Faye's obsessions, I'm finding Indie music not only interesting... I actually like it! Which is odd to say, because I haven't liked modern music since Nirvana was around.

Yes, I was into grunge once upon a time, in a land far far away called High School.

Anyway... so now I've been properly introduced to groups like Good Charlotte, Mogwai, Sigur Rós, Explosions in the Sky, The Decemberists, and Interpol, among many others.

I'm finding myself really drawn toward the post-rock genre. I like to play it while I'm writing, although it gets distracting at times. Sorry, but it's too easy to start tripping to Jónsi's vocals.

If I had to make a suggestion to anyone on one particular song, I'd have to pick "Starálfur" by Sigur Rós on their Ágætis Byrjun album. It is so beautiful. I can listen to that song over and over. Even if you don't understand the language, you have to appreciate the instrumentation.

I might start writing reviews on the various bands I'm finding, particularly Sigur Rós, since I now have a lot of their stuff. It'd be fun to do, and it'd give me something to fill this blog with... maybe something people will actually come back and read =)

I did, after all, major in music for three years.

Oh, the memories of writing music reviews!

Curse my frontal cortex!

Wedding

2006-02-26T16:37:00.000-08:00

Alright, got a few wedding pics now. Here's just one.

That's the family sash I'm wearing. It was part of the ceremony, a Scottish tradition, hanging of the family tartan. I wore it the whole day, even though it kept wanting to fall off. Now when we go to Scottish festivals, I can wear my sash and show I'm a part of the clan.

And you can't tell that well here, but that dutch crown braid turned out beautifully. Shelly did an amazing job with my hair. Everyone said it was one of the prettiest, most unique weddings they had ever been to. And I had fun, which is what counts.

Eye Candy

2006-02-26T03:55:00.000-08:00

Okay, you'll probably have to click this to make it large. I love these mind games!

What's the Opposite Of Writer's Block?

2006-02-25T03:28:00.000-08:00

I've been in a writing sprint, but for how rushed my brain is going (thank goodness I'm not working now) I'm simply running out of things to work on that don't take some serious research, which I don't feel like doing. So... blog time!

I'm trying to seriously jumpstart my writing career, looking into getting a publishing agent to help out. I have one bookmarked, sounds like a real good group, not just some lawyer who likes to read contemporary stuff. They're in Oregon, so when we move up there, it'll work out great. Then they set me up with a publisher, do all the legal work that I'd have no clue where to even start. In return: 10%. Yikes. But then again, earning 90% of something is better than 100% of nothing, and I really don't feel like learning lawyer-ese just to publish this damn book. I'm getting a bit frustrated with it (I've been saying that for, what, eight years?).

Well, it's getting closer to being finished. I'm avoiding the research by jumping ahead to a later chapter. I hate doing that, it makes me confused with continuity. But... I really am in a fingers-flying-frantically-fast-fury feeling.

Woo! Say that three times fast!

Downing a cold cup of coffee in four seconds doesn't help. Wish me luck!

2006 - Better Days

2006-01-01T03:14:00.000-08:00

It's 2006. I give a wish out to the world, and Johnny Rzeznik summed it up best:

I wish everyone was loved tonight
And somehow stop this endless fight
Just a chance that maybe we'll find better days.

So take these words and sing out loud
Cuz everyone is forgiven now
Cuz tonight's the night the world begins again.

May everyone take this new beginning and make better days for the whole world.

Peace!

Back In The Game

2005-12-26T00:06:00.000-08:00

Hey, been a long time since I posted anything serious. I got married and all that, just a tad busy. Everything turned out great!

That's our engagement picture to the right, taken in Laguna Beach by Matt's dad. He's an awesome freelance photographer. Everyone thought it was some store-produced professional job, not US!

I don't have pictures of the wedding on my computer yet, but I'll put some up when I get around to it.

So, lately I've been playing wife. We've got a nice little one-bed apartment in the downtown area, but it's not too bad of an area. We just spent our first Christmas together as husband as wife. Not too much. We went to his parents' house, had a great dinner, and got some nice gifts, mostly more stuff for the house.

Get Beat

2005-12-20T23:13:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to post this comic. I love Get Fuzzy, maybe because my husband (oooh sounds so neat to use that word!!) has a SharPei and I once had a cat who lost a tooth... and had an attitude like Bucky. She was the Queen!

Wedding Preps

2005-09-02T02:25:00.000-07:00

Well, one month before the big white dress day. Wedding jittering haven't hit yet, but I'm expecting them to any day. Matt and I will be going up to Portland for our honeymoon, checking out our new home, then a trip down Hwy 101 and the raw beauty of the Pacific Coast.

I know I won't have time to keep this updated, although there will be lots to talk about, I'm sure. I'll start back with posting after the wedding is over.

Rascally Wench of the RenFaire

2005-06-14T11:53:00.000-07:00

Well, I finally got around to attending a Renaissance Faire, after obsessing over them for years. It's always been too far away, but now it's just over the hill. So, I donned my dress and Matt wore his new kilt. We made quite a dashing couple!

One thing that caught my attention was the bawdiness of the songs. I don't know, in history class you don't get the true feel of what the Ren times were all about. You hear about castles and knights and artists and playwrites, but there's little for the senses. You don't smell the Renaissance times (and trust me, it was so hot and dusty, by noon there was quite a smell). And you don't hear it. There's a sound to Renaissance faires. Not just the language. There's the harp and pipe, the nasal of the sackbut, the strumming of the lute, the drone of the bagpipes, and the bouncing lyrics of the songs... songs that are risque while still presuming to be peasantish and simple.

I have a favorite group, called the Brobdingnagian Bards. They're in Texas, so I've never seen them live, but I caught their music on download.com and instantly went wow! Please, if you want to know what Renaissance music is like, check them out. I have some of their CDs, and they have free songs to download too. Now, whenever Matt wears his kilt, I start singing "Donald, Where's Your Trousers."

Another great RenFaire music group who I saw yesterday was The Merry Wives of Windsor. These girls (and guy musicians) are not only lovely and talented, they made me laugh until my corset hurt! You've gotta love songs called "The Bartering Whore" and "I Live to Give My Husband Grief." I warn you only this: these songs are not something to play to your children!

Then there was of course the beer, the sonorous language, meeting the Queen, working on my genuflect, drinking beer, the jousting, the jugglers, the beautiful costumes, someone dressed at Captain Jack Sparrow (and damn good!), the tasty beer, the magicians, the gypsies, the who-needs-bloody-utensils food... did I mention the beer?

One lesson I learned, and a hint to anyone thinking about dressing up for the RenFaire: corsets are not for the faint of heart! I've worn corsets before, but this was pure torture! It reached over 90 degrees yesterday, and I thought I was going to pass out. I had to keep sitting to catch my breath.

But everything was great otherwise. Matt got some training in sword mastery. I just wish I had thought about pulling out my camera, catching a shot of him swinging around that huge claymore! He was in heaven! I couldn't help but think of medieval phallic symbols and hum one of those Windsor wenches tunes.

I'm definitely going again next year, even if it's bloody hot again.

The Bermuda Triangle

2005-04-11T04:18:00.000-07:00

A little background. Things in my room disappear and reappear way too frequently. I mean, they will vanish and reappear smack dab next to me.

Well, I was looking for my W-2 forms to finish up my tax returns. I did the State taxes already, but lost the Federal forms. So, still unable to find the forms, I decide, what the heck, I'll do it online.

I knew I filed my W-2 forms in my top drawer, where I put all my important papers. So I look. Not there. I just cleaned my top drawer too (looking for something I knew was there, and never did find it until a week later)! I get my sister Aggy, and we look everywhere for these stupid forms. I tell her about things disappearing, and she says she knows, Dad has complained about it too, losing tools in my room just to have them reappear exactly where he knew they were last (see this past post).

Well, I'm freaking out because many hours have passed and no sign of the forms, and taxes are due in four days. I checked the drawer multiple times. Finally, I complain about it to Matt over IM, and he asks if I just shout "I give up," maybe whatever is hiding my stuff will give it back. That worked once, looking for a necklace. I had cleared my piano seat totally off, knowing that's where I left it, then shouted "Forget it!" in frustration. Thirty minutes later, the necklace was laying in the middle of the cleared piano bench.

So, it worked once, I try it again.

Hour later, I look in the drawer.

Nothing.

Aggy suggests I start looking in places I know I would never, ever put it. Well, one instantly comes to my mind. My vanity desk. I keep the mirror lid down all the time, usually piled with crap on top, so I never put anything inside in. I clear off the lid and open it.

There, in the middle of the vanity, are my W-2's.

I screamed with frustration.

Someone is getting a kick out of doing this to me.

La Conchita

2005-01-10T14:19:00.000-08:00

I want to say, perhaps someone wanted me to truly be thankful.

Just a few hours ago, I posted about being thankful California rains aren't too bad. And then this happens just a few miles north of me.

I hope the people of La Conchita find their loved ones

A little perspective

2005-01-10T02:11:00.000-08:00

It's been raining nonstop for a while here, and my neighborhood has started flooding. We live in the bottom of a valley, and my street is one of the major roads coming down off the hill, so it can turn into a real river. I spent this evening sandbagging our front door and garage.

Now, I usually gripe and complain when I have to go out in the rain and put heavy bags of sand up, making our house into a miniature fortress. But as I hunched over the sand pit with my shovel and a wet bag, I thought of the people in East Asia, people who had no warning, people for whom some foot high wall of sand would have been no security.

Perspective!!!

I stopped grumbling instantly. I think other families filling bags with me thought the same thing, because it was surprisingly quiet.

So what if a few inches of water seep into our house. Who cares if the carpet gets wet. At least we'll have a house in the morning! And our lives!