Tag: Sentential Links

Because the links Never. Stop. Coming!

:: Looks like I need a good cherry pie recipe! (Oooh, that reminds me: I got tart cherries at the farmer’s market the other day, so I gotta take some in with lunch tomorrow. And that deep dish pizza I made yesterday? The onions and peppers and sausage were all local! Yay, me! I’m responsible and stuff!)

:: It took thirty years…but when Shirley went off, she took the rest of the building with her. Some claim is was a tumor in her brain but I know it was that desk that drove Shirley crazy. (No! I love that desk! Say it ain’t so!)

:: Our human calendars, analog, digital, and virtual, on our walls and on our screens, say it’s August 1st today. But according to the floral clocks along the roadside it’s been August here for over a week. The daylilies have faded and the goldenrod, wave after feathery yellow wave, has taken over. (I love me some August, and in fact, I have just decided the other day that I will complain about hot-and-humid July nevermore, so long as August remains an absolute treat ’round these parts. It’s by far the best of the summer months. Of course, given how the seasons function in WNY, there are only two summer months. June is the better part of spring — what everyone else in the country enjoys in early May, that’s what we’re basking in when June arrives. July is usually when all the unpleasant heat and humidity rock the place, although aside from a five or six day string of it, this year didn’t see much of that at all. In August, though, temperatures and humidity tend to drop to very pleasant levels. Yes, technically, September is mostly a summer month, by definition, but let’s be honest: emotionally, once Labor Day is past, it’s Fall. Which means, soon I’ll be back into overalls full-time! Huzzah!!!)

:: And if you’re going to read books, don’t just concentrate on structure. Read books about character development. For my money, THAT’S your real starting point. Good, fresh, original, compelling characters.

:: At the ripe old age of 34 I firmly believe that I am living in the midst of the Geek Golden Era. With comic books, movies, TV shows, and everything else blurring together, I am getting everything I ever wanted in life handed down to me.

:: So, in summary: I believe what we’re seeing is a move towards the global imposition of a police state in the developed world, leveraging the xenophobia that naturally emerges during insecure times, by a ruling elite who are themselves feeling threatened by a spectre. Controls on movement, freedom of association, and speech are all key tools in the classic police state’s arsenal.

:: Neil Armstrong is a particularly refreshing idol in this regard because there’s nothing particularly exceptional about him. Well…that’s not entirely true. He tended to crash planes. A lot.

More next week!

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Linkin’ my way around Blogistan….

:: Today, I had the image of a chalkboard in mind. Remember, at the end of the day, when it was covered with what had been written, erased, written over? Throughout the day, new information on top of old, learning, more and more. Then, at the end of the day, it would be wiped clean with a wet sponge. It was best if you took time and did it in straight lines, leaving few streaks and a nice, orderly clean board ready for the next day. (Nostalgia note: I don’t particularly miss chalkboards, but I do miss the sound that chalk made on the slate as it wrote. I remember when I’d get a chance to write at the chalkboard and I’d wonder, “Why is Mrs. Pnakovich’s writing so amazing on this thing, and mine looks like crap?” Years of practice, obviously….)

:: Enough, DC. Every character doesn’t have to be 1970s Spider-Man, hunted and feared. Enough having heroes kill, or being made to look like they killed. Enough secret government agencies dedicated to controlling/fighting/eliminating heroes. Enough fear and distrust by the press and public when these guys have saved the world seven times over. Enough.

Let. Heroes. Be. Heroes.

:: Being the terrible blogger that I am, I have totally neglected mentioning the fact that we got a cat this year.

:: Fan fictions are hard for me to let live outside of my imaginations. I’m basically playing with someone else’s characters for a while, whom I think I know but don’t really. (I couldn’t agree more, which is why when I committed acts of fan fiction way back when, I didn’t even use the names of the characters — I gave them new names and reworked them in directions I wanted them to go. This blog belongs to one of my Instagram contacts.)

:: She will not mourn this empty bed. (Another Instagram blogger. I’ve met a lot of writers there. We’re all chasing the dream!)

:: A question I’m always asked is why don’t I put my writing “out there” more? The answer is: Because I am, essentially, a weenie. You can judge me now. Go ahead. I’ll wait. (Nah. No judgment here!)

:: Nobody comes to the ballpark to see a closer, no matter how good he is. Not even fans of the team he pitches for want to see him pitch because his appearance means their team isn’t winning handily going into the eighth and ninth innings. They’re glad to see him, but they’d rather their team was up 6-2 at this point than 2-1. If the closer comes in with his team up 6-2, that means the game is in the process of being lost! And while there are plenty of ways a 2-1 game can be exciting, the closer isn’t really part of it. His job is to put an end to the excitement. (Hmmmmm. See, I don’t know about this. There are times when you desperately want to see your closer out there. Especially if your team doesn’t have a closer. Believe me, if the Pirates had had a real honest-to-God closer in 1992, I would have been thanking every God, Goddess, and eldritch power that has ever existed to see him take the mound in the ninth inning of Game Seven of that year’s NLCS. Because the inning that ensued, as the closer-less, bullpen-by-committee Pirates — forced to try to ride the weary arm of Doug Drabek one more inning before handing a bases-loaded jam to Stan Belinda, who had all of 18 saves that year — surrendered both their 2-0 lead and, with it, that year’s National League pennant, is to this day the single most gut-wrenching thing I’ve ever seen in sports. And I’m a Buffalo Bills fan who had to endure Wide-Right just eighteen months earlier.)

:: I’m ready for bed, but more importantly I am excited about tomorrow. I think that is what success really is, at least to me. To go to sleep happy and tired and excited about nothing in particular but the possibility ahead. Some folks never get to feel that, or gave it up long ago. I’m still on that horse. It’s worth it.

More next week!

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Holy crap, it’s been a long time since the last time I did one of these. I know the blog has spent an unfair amount of time on the back burner of late, as I strive to beat Princesses Still In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) into submission, but wow. Anyway, here are some linkworthy links.

:: In the similar mode, I’m suggesting a “slow audience response” movement. Please stop talking when the speaker/movie/concert starts, and wait for the event to actually end before fumbling with your keys. You may actually enjoy it better if you are “present” at the event, rather than treating it as one more thing to check off the to-do list. I KNOW your fellow audience members will appreciate it. (I couldn’t agree more. I’ve never understood why it is that people are always in such a damned rush to get out of the movie theater. And it’s like a conditioned response with some folks: their brains are wired to bounce up and head for the exit the second the words “Directed by ___” appear on screen. I’ve noticed, over the last few years, that sometimes movies will have “Easter Egg” content during the credits, if not actual scenes, so the credits-sprinters will stand up, move to the stairs along the side, and then stand there until they’re satisfied that they can leave. Why not just keep your asses in the seats? Where are you going?!

I recall some conversation years ago on some classical music-related blogs on the subject of applause in between movements of multi-movement works. This doesn’t really bother me all that much, but I do recall attending a Buffalo Philharmonic concert years ago when they played the Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5. There’s a spot in the last movement where everything builds to one long, dramatic chord, which the orchestra holds until the conductor gives the cut-off. There’s a pause of a few seconds, and then the conductor cues the orchestra to begin the final portion of the work. The problem is, the folks at the concert weren’t musically literate enough to not recognize the fact that that long, sustained chord couldn’t possibly be the end of the work. So as soon as the conductor cut the chord off, the audience started applauding. For a work that wasn’t even finished. Oy.)

:: They were both great horses, but the difference between Roy Rogers’ Trigger and the Lone Ranger’s Silver was that Trigger was well-trained. Silver just knew. (I still want to see The Lone Ranger, and almost certainly will, when it comes to DVD.)

:: The waiter apologizes and says he hasn’t felt good all night. He thinks it’s something he ate. Oh, that’s comforting. Your waiter has such a high fever he could could fry your Monte Christo on his head. (Mmmmmm…Monte Cristo sandwich…ummm, sorry.)

:: Dear Mr. Card,

I wanted you to know that I recently read your statement regarding the proposed boycott of ‘Ender’s Game’, and I can understand where you’re coming from in your plea for tolerance. Believe me, I can understand what it’s like to worry that your livelihood will be affected by the intolerance of others. Many of my LGBT friends have had to face open discrimination in the workplace due to the kind of open hatred you personally fostered with your time and money…and in fact, continue to foster today, despite your belief that the whole issue is now “moot”. So I can deeply sympathize with your hope that “the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.”

:: What if E.T. and the Thing had a baby, and horribly, that baby was Jeff Bridges?

:: Providence has sent a solution after all! (I can barely process this.)

:: For me, the point of having a personal blog is that it’s basically a journal for me. A place where I talk to myself about whatever the hell I want. A place to work out how I feel about my life and the world, or to document my struggle with weight and mental disorders, or to list my favorite things, or to talk about the movies I saw. If someone else reads it and likes it, cool. That’s wonderful. But it’s not done for them. It’s done for me. It’s done because I feel a need to write it all down someplace. That’s the point of it. Frankly, the only person that I really, truly care about reading it is my wife, because I want my wife and me to know each other as much as possible. She’s really the only one who I need to understand me. It’s not about validation by strangers; it’s just me having fun and introducing a fraction of structure into my weekly routine.

:: And watch Monteith, and how accessible he is, how available. He’s a big strapping guy, a foot taller than everyone else, and his body shows the awkwardness of not quite knowing what to do with himself, but that just makes him more honest, more open: there is no artifice in him, no protection, no holding back. (I’ve never liked Glee, but my dislike of the show has always been mostly on a conceptual level and in the way it treats the music and the enterprise thereof. The talent involved in the show, however, is quite often jaw-dropping. This young man’s passing is a cruel, cruel loss.)

More next week! (I hope!)

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Linkage! Some of these are new to me, blogs by folks I’ve met through Instagram.

:: I’m trying to focus on the things that I want to make habits, to work on finding a less cranky place to come from. Seems a good goal, overall.

:: Their story is still being written. Their possibilities are endless. The future is up for grabs, to take and mold it as they please.

:: But I struggle with the label of bisexual. For me that implies a desire for that particularly womanly taste and scent, the softness of the curves of the female, balanced with a longing for the hardness of males. This is not my experience. I cannot claim “queer” as an identity, as I am objectively “not-queer.” I am ambisexual, uni-sexual, ambiguously sexual…who can say.

I am, in the end, just me. (Aren’t we all? Labels are such a pain in the ass…but they make talking about stuff so much easier. Weird.)

:: I woke up with this feeling, a season change is clear in the air. It rained all night, and that’s good for the plants, not for my mind, I’ve been praying, like every day, for our home to be safe, for my cats and dog to be safe when i’m working.

:: Kat Dennings is an almost-perfect choice for Maddy. She is witty and sarcastic, but can turn on the dramatic when the scenes call for a bit of seriousness. Although Maddy is described as only 5’1, Kat’s curves are exactly how I pictured my MC when I wrote her character. (I can’t say I haven’t pictured Kat Dennings as the older of the two Princesses In SPACE!!! [not the actual title], but I haven’t mentally cast her, either, mainly because she’s likely unconvincingly old for that part. Alas!)

:: I was the kid that gave her barbies cancer. They had terrible, and rather short lives in my make-believe world. Bad things just happened and I was aware of it.

:: Shakespeare wrote plays, not novels; that is, his works were meant to be seen and heard, not read — at least not at first. While I prefer live theater, that’s more easily said than done for some folks, given travel, time, and/or budgetary considerations. In my experience, then, a well regarded film is preferable to an amateur-ish “Shakespeare in the Park” production. Bad theater, no matter how well intentioned, is just bad theater.

:: My father loved to write crap down. He’d dream up some idea or another, and he’d jot it down in one of a half-dozen little notebooks he used to carry around with him. I remember one time as a kid when I asked him about something, and to answer me he produced one of his older notebooks. Hell, I can’t remember what it was I asked. But I clearly remember him ruffling through page after page of drawings and scribbles, trying to find the answer. He paused on one page, which contained a crude (but surprisingly precise) drawing of a suitcase with two different kinds of wheels on it. “I really should’ve done something about that,” he said, tacitly suggesting he’d scooped the originator’s patent. (At work, I always carry a notepad with me. Always. I have to. If I’m working in one part of the store and I realize I need to cut a piece of material, it’s easier to take my measurement on site, jot it down, and go make the cut. That’s just one example. Oddly, I don’t carry any kind of notepad around when I’m just me, being Joe Blow Writer Dude out and about. This seems odd, but it occurs to me that I rarely have any big writing ideas when I’m out and about being Joe Blow Writer Dude. I’ve come to a point where The Muse seems to only drive by and chuck shit out the window at me when he knows I’m gonna be right here, ass in chair, banging away on the keyboard.)

:: May I make it clear, please: next time some yahoo proclaims the word of God as a tool of oppression (and/or stupidity), just assume I oppose it. I may not mention it all the time, because that’s what I would be writing about ALL THE TIME. I’m not interested in doing that; it would be boring for me, and quite possibly for you.

More next week!

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Linkage!

:: It’s also a reminder of how people entertained themselves; they sang and told stories and gathered with friends. In the darkness, I considered calling a friend to see if he wanted to meet me at our local pub; remember, there’s a reason ‘you all begin in a tavern’ makes perfect sense in many game-worlds.

For the Cabin Boy and Cabin Girl, the blackout was an adventure; for me, it was a reminder of what my world of adventure is really like.

:: Personal responsibility is cool if you can afford it. (Anyone who says that they did it themselves, with no help from anyone especially the government, is so full of crap that they can be discounted automatically and completely.)

:: There are places you can go where you can escape discomfort. There are places you can plug in machines to pretend weather doesn’t exist. There are people who will tell you that humidity is a horrible thing and should be avoided at all costs. Do not go to those places, avoid plugs when you can, and never believe a liar. Because there is nothing more beautiful in this angry, scary world than a hundred fireflies in the dark of a lightening-kissed sky. Nothing. (I like the sentiment here…but I also find heat and humidity loathsome and soul-crushing. Your mileage, and all that.)

:: As much as Will Smith wishes it, he cannot WILL his son into being a movie star.

:: I don’t believe there ever has been a time like this in our history. We have had periods of severe political polarization before, but those were periods in which the government was polarized because of conflicting ideas of what the national government should do. Right now, we have a polarization based on the fact that an uncontrollable faction of one of our two political parties — a faction with its own sources of money and power that exist outside conventional political accountability — has decided that the only thing that the national government should do is nothing, a faction that is perfectly situated to make that at least part of a political reality, and a faction that is growing even faster out in the states than it is in Washington. What is leadership if there’s more political profit in ignoring your leaders than in being led? Who, in that case, rules? The truly terrifying answer to that is that nobody does. Or, at least, nobody who is elected does.

:: So why did we accept Archie Bunker?

Because Edith loved him. Because the person with the kindest heart on the planet knew he wasn’t really hateful, he was just railing. We loved her and if she loved him then he couldn’t be so bad after all.

:: Funky Winkerbean very, very rarely focuses on the positive. Still, the message I’m getting from today’s strip is: if your father was killed when you were a baby, maybe it’s just as well, because maybe he was an asshole you would’ve hated. (The current storyline in FW is unimaginably bad, even by FW standards. If it didn’t take five point seven seconds each day to read the thing, I’d be embarrassed that I’m wasting the time I am upon it.)

:: When Marilyn’s inner light—that luminosity she could turn on with one brilliant pout of her lips, with one glance of moist, widened eyes, with one flash of that glimmering, sometimes puckish smile—departed her body, she didn’t lose her power. She lost her life, and that was tragic and indeed too soon. But that vulnerable woman, that strong woman—a woman both in charge of her life and deeply unsure of herself, full of hope and dope and dreams and fear of the future—that woman maintained her power. (Heavens, what a good essay. Check this one out.)

More next week. If you’re nice. Harumph!

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It’s time! For Links! And overuse of Exclamation Points!!!!!

:: Ending a campaign is a difficult process. One of my games is coming to a close within a month or so, and I’m actually extremely nervous. This current campaign is the final one of three that have taken three years to come to fruition, and now that the end is nigh, I have to worry about making it truly epic and worth the investment my players have put into it.

Part of the trepidation comes from the inevitability of The Big Reveal, in which a secret that I’ve hidden clues to throughout the campaign is unleashed, leaving the players hopefully with minds blown. Pretty much the entire game has been leading to this moment from level one all the way to level twenty. How does one reveal a game changing secret without making the players feel betrayed or cheated, and how does one end a campaign three years in the making? (One question I’ve considered over the course of the “video games as art” debate is: what about non video games? The story beats of a really well-run and well-designed game can become a HUGE part of one’s story DNA.)

:: Yankee Candle is overrated. (Ayup. But then, I pretty much like candles more for light than for scent.)

:: Sidebar #1: Did you see where Melissa Joan Hart is trying to get a project funded on Kickstarter? And here’s her big incentive: She’ll follow you on Twitter for a year. Oh, be still my heart! You and Melissa will be BFF’s! Every day she’ll go on Twitter to see how you’re coming on that dress you’re making for the prom. OR… she agrees to follow 20,000 people and never once looks at her Twitter page. Which do you think is more likely? (Huh? Of what possible use to me would be having Melissa Joan Hart as a Twitter follower? But then, I’m incredibly ill-attuned to things like who follows me on Twitter or on the blog. When people unfollow me, it often takes me months to realize it, if I ever do. So as an incentive, I…simply do not get this, at all.)

:: When some guy loses his life savings playing a carnival game, you just say, “Hunh?” When a government ministry lays down millions to buy pixie dust, you have to say “Wow!”

:: Well, one of the things I listed on the update was to go Somewhere Else and write a book. I’ve thought about this so often–whenever I’m in a new city for more than a few days. Writing books is the great activity of my life. Some people look at place and imagine the club scene–I imagine what it would be like to write a book there. For me, the process of writing is such an otherspace–out of my own everyday and into the unknown and odd and untethered to such things as like, a normal workday clock or regular meals.

:: I was asked to write the following quiz up by my boss, to distribute to the new hires. (Note to self: do this quiz.)

:: Back in the Spring of 1980, when I was 16 years-old, my family took a vacation trip to Washington D.C. with a side trip to the Amish country of Pennsylvania. I was particularly excited to visit the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Museum because I knew that the original U.S.S. Enterprise model, used in the filming of Star Trek, was on display there. Everything else about that trip was pretty much of secondary importance to me. What really mattered was getting to see that iconic starship with my own eyes.

:: I absolutely adore this, and can’t wait to hang it up. Anne may not be Dale Arden, and god knows I’m a long way from anything resembling Flash Gordon… but she awakens many of the same yearnings this painting always has. I’m thankful she’s still standing with me in this strange future land in which we’ve found ourselves… (Wow! I want one!)

:: I do know enough about myself and this farm to know this is a phase. And all this fear and frustration and deadlines and bill calls will ebb and flow away. Right now I need to focus on the work, and working a little harder to make ends meet, but it’ll all be fine. Whenever I feel panic wash over me I just sit outside on my porch and take a deep breath or seven with my eyes closed. I tell myself when I open them I will be surrounded by a farm I built by hand, through nothing but scrappy willm hard work, and the kindness and devotion of a readership all over the world. And when I open my eyes the proof is all around me. It’s in the waddling ducklings parading to the well. It’s in the sounds of Joeseph the sheep on the hillside. It’s in the flickering ears of Merlin, the toss of his mane. It’s in a dog with a sore paw, and a house with apple blossoms crowning a rack of antlers, and in the heart of the girl breathing slow on a porch.

Good things are on the way, and the only way out is through. (I love that: The only way out is through. I’ll need to remember that.)

More next week!

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I have linkage for you. You will click them. And then we will all frolic in the Land of Links!

:: If nothing else, that phone call was a valuable reminder that words have power, and the online world is not so insulated from the real world as we all like to believe. (This is a very powerful post…but you have to read his backstory to get it. It’s all very sad, all the way around.)

:: Oh, man, Darrin’s bio-dad is just not going to give up on his mission of assholery, is he? I have literally no idea what he thinks is going to happen if he goes public with the knowledge that Dead Lisa had sex as a teenager and had a kid and gave it up for adoption. (This storyline on Funky Winkerbean is seriously goofy. There’s this guy who keeps lurking around and sneering and saying things like “Soon we’ll all be one happy family again!” FW is one of the worst things ever, and yet, I can’t look away. It’s like getting to drive by a mangled car wreck each and every day, in which nobody actually died. Except the fictional characters, who all suffer endlessly.)

:: I’ve thought for a long while that any long-running series eventually stops being about anything other than itself. Each individual story might be about something; “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield”, for example, is about the absurdity of racial prejudice. But that’s not what ‘Star Trek’ is about. Other episodes of the series were about friendship, or about sexism, or about obsession…until eventually, all you could really say about the series was that it was about the Enterprise crew and the things that happened to them. Each episode was like a color transparency, laid over each other episode until all you could see was a character-shaped hole.

:: Writing is one of the arts, or it used to be before people started treating it like a career choice. When I find myself suddenly without my Mojo, I mentally backtrack until I find where I lost it. Nine times out of ten, it’s waiting right at the point when I began to think instead of feel.

:: Tycho Brahe, apparently, used to put on his court robes every time he looked through a telescope.

I think that’s really cool. (As I noted in Sheila’s comments, I’ve over the last several months stopped writing in my PJs and whatnot. I dress for work. Even if it’s putting on overalls, it’s something. I’m getting to work.)

:: Because there has not been a triumph of reason over irrational fear, or an embracing of the statistically probable over the unlikely (or some might say a return of denial to avoid messy reality), but rather a choice to live my life in a more peaceful way. I learned in war that violence can happen to me, a white kid from suburban Buffalo. I learned it is not something that just happens to other people. I learned that when you are being shot at you should take cover behind your weapon. That if you are shooting at them they will put their head down and not shoot back at you. That when bullets fly – and they will, remember – that I should fight and not hide. (Brian Castner is a deeply thoughtful individual with whom I do not always agree, and with whom my disagreements almost always prompt me to at least think a bit more about my position; even if I usually come back around to my original way of thinking, I’m on better footing. My opinion of guns has not changed, but I’ve considered it more.)

:: The great thing is that I’ve met lots of new and interesting people out there in the blogosphere, with many viewpoints and stories to tell. I expect I’ll continue to visit them from time to time. Another benefit of this challenge has been the act of blogging every day without fail – getting into the habit and making it part of what I do. I’m also happy that I actually had something to say, whether it was in poetry, a quote or just a few words about wellbeing, which is very important to me. (This really is the main benefit of the A-to-Z Challenge. For me, I have found that two years in a row, it results in a brief and small influx of new readers, but they all tend to disappear again. If there’s one thing that bothers me about blogging here in 2013, it’s that the old sense in Blogistan of various communities emerging doesn’t seem to happen much anymore. But I’ll do it again next year; in fact, I’ve already picked my category.)

:: The main knock on the iPad as a camera is that the thing is big and people look goofy taking pictures with it. But, you know. If you’re the sort of person who judges another person for using an iPad to take a picture, who is the actual asshole in that scenario? Hint: Probably not the dude holding the iPad. (This really doesn’t bother me, although it can get distracting at things like school concerts. You can always tell which parents have kids onstage for each ensemble because all of a sudden, a whole new set of iPads get waved in the air.)

More next week!

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Pilfering more participants from A-to-Z this week….

:: Kind of cheating today, since the letter Q doesn’t exist in the Greek alphabet! So, quests it is (it was a toss up between quests and queens) and I’m going with the quests of Theseus.

:: For the challenge this year, I have decided to challenge you. Because I love mathematics codes, and riddles, my 26 posts will test your brain. (Gotta look back on this one….)

:: Admittedly, one of Marvel’s more….strange…as well as obscure characters. I think this one might be the most obscure of the whole twenty-six I planned for this challenge.

:: Six years ago my husband bought me a beautiful leather journal for Christmas. The journal sat on a shelf for a few months because I wasn’t sure what I should write in it.

I wanted it to be more than a diary. I have to be honest, I always felt a little corny when I would write a daily entry in the diary I received when I was younger. The process felt forced to me.

:: Need help knowing how to talk to your teenage son? First off, what NOT to do: Never ask him directly how he feels. If you make that mistake, your conversation will be very short and will likely involve nothing but shrugs and grunts on his part.

:: When I was researching this piece, I found that Rachel had done a huge amount of film scores that I really love and actually own. It’s great to see women making their way in this still hugely male dominant arena.

:: The electronic format is definitely a large part of the future of gamebooks, but I’m hopeful that printed versions will continue to be produced, aka Destiny Quest. I’d like to see gamebooks explore different concepts – while hack ‘n’ slash has its place, it would be great to see gamebooks where the choices made have real consequences, beyond “you don’t have this item so the dragon eats you”. Imagine a gamebook based on the ideas explored in Planescape: Torment or Tides of Numenera. (I have no idea what a ‘gamebook’ is. I need to look this up.)

:: Questions left unanswered. It’s a bit of a long stretch but what I really mean is cliffhangers. I have a very love/hate relationship with cliffhangers.

However, I hate being on the reading end when a bomb drops and you know theres no way you’re sleeping tonight because you just have to finish the whole book after that.

More next week. Maybe. Or not. Who can tell, in these times of unpredictability? I could just end this post in the middle of a word, breaking off in highly strange fash

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Again, I’m going to rely on the master list of A-to-Z blogging participants for this week’s linkage. Check them out! There’s a lot of good stuff being done out there in Blogistan. Anyone who says that blogging is dead isn’t paying attention, and anyone who ignores personal blogs is losing out on a lot of great insight and writing.

Links!

:: Liripipe
noun [lir-ee-pahyp] –
a hood with a long, hanging peak, worn originally by medieval academics and later adopted for general wear in the 14th and 15th centuries.

:: I love writing fantasy. True, I’ve written stories in our world, but there is something fun about creating your own world. Plus, I have to admit I’m a bit lazy when it comes to research. Always have been. But in fantasy in an alternate Earth, I can use my imagination. If I want something to work a certain way, then it’s my right. Within reason, of course. Even fantasy has to have some basis in reality. *laughs*

:: HWMMS: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaa! (Electric flickers.)

Me: (LEAPING FROM THE COUCH therefore spilling my glass of water all over the remote controls, which apparently is more important than the fact I thought my Husband just got electrocuted and I need to learn to be more careful.)

:: Follow your writer’s dream; do everything within your power to make it come true. (Good advice! I shall now track down every agent I’ve queried and kidnap their dogs and/or children, with a representation deal as ransom!

No, I won’t do that. Sheesh.)

:: The letter L makes me think of South America. That’s became of Fernando Lamas, and llamas . . . and my old Roger Corman buddy, Lucho Llosa. (This blogger is doing A-to-Z on Roger Corman. That…is…awesome.)

:: It wasn’t the smell of unfamiliar perfume that did it. It was the dark, rusty red lipstick that stained the collar of his shirt that made her freeze like a broken down robot, the offensive collar stretched out in front of her by trembling hands. She wasn’t sure what to do next, so she just stood there staring at it.

:: One of the advantages and frustrations of being a writer is how little people in your own family actually read what you write. Today, it is an advantage. It means I can write about my oldest child. (What a lovely tribute!)

More next week!

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