Archive for February, 2010
I want to give you all - the faithful among you - a little reward. People like my uncle, whom I’ve often quoted on this blog, www.newmexiken.com, can avert their eyes.
This is the cover for my new book - Out of Heaven. It’s due to go up in the next couple of weeks. My editor and I are working very hard to get it ready. And my poor sisters have been listening to me hyperventilate over it since Valentine’s Day. But hey, that’s what they get paid for. Right?
Anyway, here it is:
Do you hear angels singing?
I had such a great day today. Ava and I went to the monthly RWA meeting. It was a really great meeting, and not just because I was recognized for the sale of Out of Heaven, but that was definitely a highlight. We get a pink silk rose for the sale of a short story/novella, and I can’t even tell you how excited I was to get that silly rose. It’s now sitting at my desk next to my computer. It’s a good inspiration.
Then, to make the day even better, I got to spend the rest of the afternoon and evening with Isabella.
My Honey took the kids to La Fiesta de los Vaqueros Rodeo. Those of you not from Tucson - this rodeo is a BIG deal. It was their first time attending the event although we’ve taken them to the rodeo parade that kicks off the whole thing for years. The Bandit has refined his desire to be a bull riding cowboy. Bull riding. Over my dead body. I don’t even want him to play football much less ride bulls. Not my precious baby boy. I new a guy when I was in my 20s that was a competition bull rider. He had a glass eye and a permanent hoof mark on the side of his face. No siree.
Dinner was very interesting tonight. I knew what we were having, but I wasn’t sure how My Honey was going to convince Sassy to eat it. She has decided, and she states her position loudly and often, that she DOES NOT LIKE TUNA FISH. I don’t know where she tasted it and decided it was not for her, but she is vehement. She will bring up her NON TUNA platform out of the blue and expound on it loudly, just in case anyone is interested.
Well, tonight, My Honey made tuna casserole. I was amused when I noticed that he had hidden the evidence stealthfully in the recycle bin under the soda cans and newspapers. I set the table with anticipation. I was undeniably excited about dinner. I decided I would just sit back and watch how he maneuvered her into eating it.
When the cover came off, Sassy said with a look of disdain, “What is that?”
“Fish,” her daddy told her. “It’s really good. Eat it.”
She looked unconvinced, but The Bandit was scarfing it down, so she must have figured, “what the heck”.
“What?” she asked me as I watched her eat her second helping with a twinkle in my eye.
“Nothing,” I told her innocently.
My Honey wanted to tell her the big secret, but I truly think it best to trick her 6 or 7 more times first. Well, it’s best for me. I need the amusement.
After dinner, we had more of My Honey’s birthday cake. 5.3 seconds after The Bandit was handed his cake plate, he threw down his fork, brandished his empty plate, and yelled, “I WIN!” Apparently, we were in a race. He’s really taking the whole Olympics thing to heart.
I think he would have lost style points due to the layer of frosting on his face that never made it to his mouth.
This from the daily calendar:
Were Alice’s adventures the by-product of a bad headache? Researchers for the British medical journal The Lancet reached that conclusion in 1999, when they analyzed the migraine hallucinations Lewis Carroll recorded in his diaries. Recurring images from the years leading up to the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 supported the thesis “that at least some of Alice’s adventures were based on Carroll’s personal migraine aura perceptions.”
Alright folks. I’ve been experiencing migraines since I was 13 years old when I went to see my first neurologist. I’ve had many very strange manifestations of these mind numbing headaches: loss of speech, loss of feeling, really severe confusion, compromised vision, auras, painful numbing in my face that’s lasted for days on end, and let us not forget, excruciating pain. I am very confident that I’ve NEVER had a hallucination that came anywhere near Alice and her visit to Wonderland.
Isabella gets them, too, and trust me, if either of us got that interesting side effect, we’d be making billions in children’s literature.
I think these researchers ought to revisit Mr. Carroll’s drug use.
Yesterday I took a day out of writing to pout. And I threw a little temper tantrum that involved stomping my feet. I gave myself a few hours to act like a temperamental artist.
Tonight, I’m back to figuring out writing solutions to impossible requests and trying to beat deadlines.
And to be perfectly honest, a little pouting too. Or at the very least a little muttering under my breath.
To all of you fans of Jennifer Ashley and the Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie, I did an interview with her. It’s posted on my Romance Novel Examiner site.
Hustle on over there and read it. She was super nice and very generous with her time. Remember that I will be the moderator for her program with the Tucson Festival of Books, March 13-14.
The next installment isn’t until July. I told her to write faster!
Today was my day off. The children were also off from school. And, it was My Honey’s and Roscoe the Idiot Dog’s birthdays. I should never have woken up.
I tried desperately to sleep in. No dice. I was awakened by The Bandit jumping on me. Literally. And Sassy complaining that she was huuuuuungryyyyyyy. So we got up and headed off to get Daddy’s presents. First, I had to stop off a a book store to pick up my friend’s new book. It just came out today. YIPPEE for her. Check it out - Sherrill Quinn - Taming the Moon. My children, specifically the boy, acted so horribly that I had to drag them out of the store without making my purchase.
Then we went to the mall and got My Honey’s presents and his cards.
After that I made my first of several trips to the grocery store to get the stuff to make his cake.
We went home and I made the cake with “assistance” of Sassy and The Bandit. I sent them into the living room to watch a Disney movie while I got the cake batter off the ceiling. We left the cake to cool so we could frost it and ate some popcorn and watched the movie.
Deep sigh.
So I made another trip to the grocery store for more cake mix.
I got home and got started on cake #2. Only there weren’t anymore eggs.
So I made another trip to the grocery store. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s trip number three.
While I was there, I got the email from my editor for the 1st of approximately 58,376 edits she wants me to make on the story I sold. So I had a nervous breakdown in Fry’s Grocery store and immediately called my sisters. Ava talked me off the ledge right there in the produce department. The gentleman buying bananas thought me strange indeed. I spoke with Isabella immediately after and she finished where Ava left off. I’ll be fine. Really. But, I’m certainly going to start drinking. What hard liquor goes best with cupcakes?
So it’s getting late. Let me show you what I found when I went into The Bandit’s bedroom:
I’m going to clean his room with a front loader and a dumpster tomorrow.
And this is why it takes me forever to get any writing finished. You wonder why I’m up all hours of the night? Because after I make 2 birthday cakes, do the laundry, defend the chicken parmesan from the dog and clean up this sty…….it’s freaking midnight.
Chocolate cake and my friend Jose Cuervo.
If you have a blister or a cut upon your person, don’t come to my house. I will have to send you away without first aid. Last night I was undressing The Bandit to get him in his pajamas and, when I pulled off his shirt, I found approximately 32 band-aids scattering his torso and legs. There was Batman and Scooby Doo, a random Hannah Montana here and there, a couple of Cars and Nemo, and one or two regular grown up band-aids for good measure. Every single freckle had a bandage. Every blemish. Every imperfection of his skin. Every imagined boo-boo. If you were smart, you’d invest your money in Johnson and Johnson.
My Honey and I were faithfully watching the Olympics like we have since they started earlier this month and ice dancing came on. My Honey couldn’t understand the difference between that discipline and pairs skating. I tried to explain the nuances to him, but he didn’t really want to listen. Instead, he suggested that they combine ice dancing with curling. Perhaps they could set the curling stone thingy on fire and maybe put razor blades on the little brooms to add even more danger. He thought they could change the name to Peril Skating. He may have something there. I’d like to hear Bob Costas announce that.
My Honey and I are working on a “trailer” for the story that I sold. That’s the newest fad - a 20 or 30 second video commercial if you will. I have a very clear idea of what I want it to be. I can’t tell you any more of this story because he very clearly, and in an unusually stern voice, informed me that he would divorce me without a second thought if I did. But I want you to know that there is a story out there in the ether somewhere that had me laughing so hard that I may have wet my pants just a little and certainly wheezed for the rest of the night. If he does something that REALLY pisses me off someday……
I LOVE Google. I look stuff up on my phone all the time. For example, not that long ago, My Honey and I were at a restaurant - alone, and the waiter babbled off the specials. When he got to langoustine I had to pause. I refused to admit to the waiter that I had no idea what that was. I’d heard the word before but I couldn’t bring to mind the definition or a picture in my head. I asked him to tell us how it was cooked hoping that would spark a recollection. Nope. The minute he left the table, My Honey and I said in unison, “What’s a langoustine?” Quickly I Googled it and consequently ordered it. YUM!
For those of you who don’t know either:
: a small edible lobster (Nephrops norvegicus) of European seas having long slender claws —called also Dublin Bay prawn, Norway lobster
“ooooh, put me in butter and I’ll make your taste buds sing!”
(They’re kind of creepy, no? I can eat them, but I can’t look at them. Regular lobsters either. They get my arachnophobia all in an uproar.)
Did any of the rest of you hear that really loud boom around 5:30 MST? It originated in mid-town Tucson so you of all in other states may not have heard and, those of you that are local, probably thought it had something to do with the Air Force base.
It wasn’t though. It was my brain. It exploded and it wasn’t pretty.
I came home from work and found huge sections, entire shelves actually, of my bookshelves that had been emptied entirely of books and thrown unceremoniously on the floor. The spine on my 2,232 page Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language is broken. Of course no one knows who did it.
Once upon a time, long, long ago there was a princess that lived in a lovely castle. It was clean. When the princess wanted to read a book, she would go to her library where there were rows and rows of books, some three deep, and select exactly the tome she was looking for because it would be exactly where she left it. Every book was lovingly cared for, they were all where she left them, and they were as neatly ordered as the Library of Congress.
And then she had kids and everything went to shit.
