If My Heart Were a Cat

Because I just learned that next Saturday I'll be:

Yep, the date has been set for my trip home.  Yet again.  But I really think it is going to take this time.

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A Lay on Grass

Sing It Kitteh

The scent of mown grass woke something in me today.

A Lay on Grass

by Joy Renee

Mowers purr in the scintillating air

skiffing the turf snow-blanketed

just yesterday.

The scent of awakenings seeping

into barely cracked car windows

settles on wool

and down-filled wraps, hitching a ride inside

where, harbored in hair it abides

awaiting dark

quietude, that sinking moment dream-snared,

to thrum a rapture of rebirth

laying in wait.

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20 Crocheted Bookmarks

My sister and sister-in-law both asked for ten of my crocheted bookmarks they could have on hand to give as gifts throughout the year.  I have had a stash of the original shell pattern that were tail-tucked and blocked only awaiting their ribbons.  So I got them and the ribbons out this evening and chose colors and color combos.

My stash of sans ribbon bookmarks has dropped significantly since its onetime high.  I once tried to keep three in every color and type of thread I had but after the last major addition to my thread pallet I never did get around to making up those for the stash because by then I had added new stitches and patterns to my repertoire and never looked back.

But this original pattern is simple and quick and easy to store without the ribbons in and I would like to build up that stash of all-but-ready bookmarks that I can dip into on short notice for gifts as I've been doing for over a year now. So besides replacing the ones in the colors I used as gifts or given to my sister to use as gifts and making the three in the 20 or so colors I've added to the palette since I stopped adding to the stash, I need to make close to a hundred. 

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Gone Skwirly

captioned by Joystory at cheezeburger.com

I've been awake over 36 hours.  silly me.  i was planning to crash as soon as I posted my blog. in fact was micro napping as I worked on this post.  Then my sister informed me it was snowing and sticking.  So i spent the next half hour watching out the window.  

that's all I need is another lure away from the pillow.  i'm an obsessive snow fall watcher and if not for having read an ebook all night last night i'd probably be running to the window every ten minutes tonight.  but I don't dare.  I'd be 'skwirly' for sure by dawn if I did.

it is now after 1am. I started this post before 10pm.  I'd have been done well before midnight if not for these things:

• snow watching and visiting with my sister by the window; 
• those micro naps before the snow break;
• finding the computer when I got back hibernated 
• and when i woke it up it got busy with a major download I couldn't identify that was hogging RAM and bandwidth making Windows sluggish and browser tabs freeze up;  
• and discovering after spending an hour locating and captioning a picture on cheezeburger.com that their new beta site is not providing the embed code 
• and my brain was so sluggish it took me twenty minutes to realize I could just save the image and upload it to Blogger.  

duh.   *head smack*

And now I'm feeling wide awake again.  Like I could easily read that ebook all night again.  

Or watch the snow.

OK this post is full of typos and awkward grammar.  I could and usually would spend an hour sprucing it up but i think it wold be wiser to let it go this time.  between the fumbling of my fingers which feel semi detached from my brain and the rebellion of my eyes which are refusing to stay focused (so much for reading all night again) I make three more errors every time I go to fix one.  All of the uncapped pronouns and first words are due to my pinky fingers refusing to hit the shift key hard enough.

so I'm outta here....

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Joseph Campbell Quotes

So.  Learning yesterday about the release of the film Finding Joe got me thinking about Joseph Campbell and when I start thinking about something I tend to Google just to see what comes up.  Among other things, lots of quotes.  Many had been put on inspirational posters.  I just might turn some of these into posters myself but today I just want the words to stand on their own.

Things Joseph Campbell said or wrote:

Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.



Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.



A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.


Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.


It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.

Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.

Original Experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work out life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience – that is the hero’s deed.”


The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.



We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.


When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.


Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.








I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave.

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.







The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.



Love is a friendship set to music.


Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.




Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.

A one sentence definition of mythology? "Mythology" is what we call someone else's religion

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

The cave you most fear to enter contains the greatest treasure.

As a white candle In a holy place, So is the beauty Of an aged face

Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one




Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

When we talk about settling the world's problems, we're barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It's a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.


Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends

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Finding Joe

I've been itching to get my hands (eyes, ears) on this ever since I first heard about it nearly a year ago.  I have it in my Netflix save section for DVDs not yet available.  I learned today that the DVD is now out but alas I can't send for it while I'm out of town.

Ah well.  Soon.

But just watching this trailer has woke up my thirst for reading Joseph Campbell again.  It has been over a year since I picked up one of his books to read or browse.  In fact I had Hero With a Thousand Faces out of the library as I prepped for Script Frenzy last March.

I own his Mask of God series, for books tracing the myths from Paleolithic times to the present.  I've owned if for fifteen years but unlike HWTF I've never actually finished any of them.  I've started them over and over and each time reach 100 to 200 pages in only to get distracted.

As I was packing and nnpacking them for our move the week after Christmas I promised myself I would make this the year I would read them front to back.  I came close to bringing them with me but I had been given a sort of dare by my sister to limit the number of books I brought with me. She held out promise of unlimited access to the three libraries she has cards for--the Longview Public Library,  the Vancouver Public Library system and the Lower Columbia College..  

Since I thought this was going to be a four week visit and I had over 1000 ebooks on my netbook already (have tripled that since) I rose to the challenge and brought only four.  All of them reference books related to one or more of my fiction WIP.

My visit was extended repeatedly and now I''ve been here at Mom's for 9 weeks and anticipate at least 2 more.  I had such plans for 2012 after we learned the move would be happening but most I had to put on hold until I got home.  Now the year is a quarter gone.

Ah, well.  Soon.

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Sunday Serenity #275

Two wildly different mood pieces. Love both. Both feel necessary to me today.

 Am reminded how essential music is to moderating and regulating my moods. 

 Have neglected music since I left home nine weeks ago. 

Must stop that. Just because I can't crank the boom box in an empty house doesn't mean I can't still enjoy it.

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Chocolate On My Bubblegum

Looking at these I hear a voice, an echo of that old candy commercial, saying:
You got chocolate on my bubblegum.

These three bookmarks were part of a set of four I made for my sister to give to her friend on her birthday.  The birthday was over a month ago but I just got these three dressed up last night, or rather the wee hours of this morning, so they could go with my sister today on her excursion out of town which would include a meetup with her friend.  

I'd finished the first one--a simple shell stitch with a single ribbon threaded thru the center--in time to go into the gift bag last month.  Then since I missed the deadline on these three I continued to procrastinate until I learned another visit with the friend was coming up this weekend.

And even then I waited until after midnight this morning to start working on them.  The crocheting part had been long done.  It was the dreaded tucking of the tails and the sewing on of the buttons that had me playing hide-an-go seek with the item on my todo list. 

I did enjoy the project once I got involved.  It has been quite awhile since I last did a series of fancy dress ups for the bookmarks.  In fact I think the last time was for my nieces xmas gifts and the time before that was when I was here at Mom's last summer.

That has a lot to do with how hard it was to set up a workstation that was safe from my cat Merlin who spent as much time on the bed in that room at my in-laws as I did.  He loved the ribbons and beads and buttons!

This was one of the things I was really looking forward to about having my own home.  And I actually did get to put my nieces bookmarks together at the new house on Xmas day itself--the day before we started moving in.  Which got me very excited about how it would be once we had moved in and I had a good workstation set up that I didn't have to put away when it was time for Ed to sleep and a door I could close against Merlin.

Then my long planned trip to Mom's got extended from two weeks to a month and since I got here has been extended repeatedly every time the planned day for leaving approaches.  Like happened again last week.  Now I've been here for nine weeks I think and there is at least one more but since next Saturday hasn't already been designated travel day I'm not holding much hope that it will be..  But I imagine it will be the first Saturday in April at the latest.

Meanwhile my new house seems more like a faded dream than reality.  My mental images of that room at my in-laws are ten times more vivid than those of the new place which I got to spend only ten days in all of which were devoted to packing and unpacking and packing for the trip.

I'm hoping to go to bed early tonight and by early I mean before 3am but I'm hoping even before midnight as I didn't lay down this morning until 8am and had to be up by 11:00 in order to have time to wake up and drink my coffee leisurely before it was time to fix lunch for Mom, my nephew and myself.  I also had dinner duty but my sister had made that easy by picking up TV dinners.  Thank goodness because I've been a bit out of it today.

It is my own fault.  First for procrastinating the task of dressing up the bookmarks and second for not going to bed as soonn as they were done at 4am.  Instead I returned to Mockingjay, book 3 of The Hunger Games and read until 8am.  I tried to stop at 6. But gave myself a few more minutes and within ten minutes I had passed that point in a story where stopping is nearly impossible.

This afternoon I started Jodi Picoult's House Rules.  I could easily sit up all night reading this story but I know better.  To do that twice in a row would be begging for a virus to move in on me.  Besides I'm not deep enough into the story yet to make it hard to stop so it seems wiser to get caught up on sleep tonight and save the allnighter for when I'm past the halfway to three-quarters mark.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: 10 Quotes for Scriptwriters

Rock Climbing in Idaho
Photo Credit Bureau of Land Management

Writing a screenplay is like climbing a mountain. When you’re climbing, all you can see is the rock in front of you and the rock directly above you.You can’t see where you’ve come from or where you’re going.   -Syd Field

In light of the fast oncomming headlights of Script Frenzy I've collected some inspirational and kick-butt (or kick-but) quotes:

The first draft is nothing more than a starting point, so be wrong as fast as you can.   -Andrew Stanton

Stop thinking about writing as art.  Think of it as work.  If you’re an artist, whatever you do is going to be art.  If you’re not an artist, at least you can do a good day’s work.   -Paddy Chayefsky

Successful people don’t wait. They don’t get stalled on one step, one issue, one project. They continuously go about the problem of creating value. They’re not interested in struggling and waiting, they’re focused on doing.    -Frank Darabont

A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what`s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.   -Kubrick

Our primary function is to create an emotion and our second job is to sustain that emotion.   -Alfred Hitchcock

It wasn’t until about the fifth draft of ‘sixth sense’ that I really began to figure it out. It was then that I realized he’s dead. It took me five more drafts to execute it right.   -M. Night Shyamalan

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.   -Scott Adams

Don’t get it right, get it written.   -Art Arthur

I write only when I’m inspired. Fortunately I’m inspired at 9 o’clock every morning.   -William Faulkner

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Embrace the Frenzy

This promo was created by high school students.  How cool is that.
Only two more weeks.  And a bit.
I'm slower to embrace the Frenzy this year as I'm still at my mom's where I have less control of my time than I'd like for doing this but I have more control than many who participate.  I definitely have more than high school students.  Or mothers of young children, college students, people with full time jobs or those with health challenges.  All of whom have schedules with less flexibility than mine right now.
I guess it isn't really the time that concerns me so much as the fear of allowing myself to be lost in my story the way I always do.  Communicating with me at those times is like trying to wake someone from a dream.  Those times when I know others are depending on for whatever reason I resist that total immersion that is so essential to fishing that story out of my subconscious.  Of course there is a time factor in that too but its more about my knowing that I don't shift back and forth between that day dreamy mind necessary for the story and the no-nonsense mind necessary when I'm tending to Mom's needs or the open, companionable mind required for socializing with others.

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Cant's Stop Now!

I've less than 20% of Catching Fire to read.  That's book 2 of the Hunger Games Trilogy.  And I just know I'm gonna want to open Mockingjay, the final book, as soon as I finish.

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Not Ready to Hang It Up Yet

My mom has been more productive than I have in the last couple of weeks or more.  She has been crocheting coverings for hangers.  Pictured here are just some of them.  Several have been given away as gifts already and some are already hanging in my sister's closet.  She made rainbow variegated ones for my sister.  These blue ones are for me.  I supplied the yarn and most of the hangers.

This isn't the only thing she has accomplished either. She has been winding my crochet thread off the cardboard tubes into balls for me for over a month now at the rate of one or two per day.  I haven't counted recently but I think I have less than ten more of the cotton thread for her to do.  Which should be about right as my new departure date is tentatively set for a week from Saturday.

It is amazing to see the difference in the space that thread takes up after it is off the tubes versus before.  I will get pictures soon.  But if you've ever seen the pics of the blue chest that held all of my thread you might remember that the cotton size ten thread alone took up 2.5 of the three drawers.  Now with less than ten percent left to do the balls are taking up less than half of one drawer.

This picture explains why as it shows the difference is space two nearly full balls take up before and after winding off the tubes:

These were some of the first that I did in order to make a project portable.  

 Here are some pics of my thread hoard as of approximately a year ago.  I haven't added a whole lot to it since then so it is representative of what I brought here with me this year.  The entire hoard overflows the three drawers and for over a year now I would have them stuffed and have a dozen or or two balls on the hook in portable project bags.

That is a huge help to me.  I had started doing it myself and mom asked if she could help and a few days later I stopped having got busy with other things.  But she kept going.  This will make not only storing the thread in waiting for projects easier but traveling with it and of course the individual projects will be more portable.  Many can be pocket sized even.

Mom also folds the laundry every day.  My sister brings it up from the laundry room and leaves it on the couch for her.  So in spite of her eyesight failing rapidly and constant pain in her hip and back she is not hang it up yet.

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How Fast Do You Read?

Source: Staples eReader Department

Ever since I started reading ebooks last fall, I had the sense that I was reading significantly faster than I had been with tree books using regular sized fonts.  Now I know for sure.

It was hard to judge since the ebooks don't measure by pages and when it says I'm at 20% what is being measured.  Nor when it says 244/556.  When I read 1Q84 this past week the second number was 2343 and I know the book was not 2343 pages so it isn't pages they measure.  I tried counting the words on a screen and then trying to keep track of how many screens I read in a minute or in five minutes but I could not keep the count straight plus trying to keep an eye on the clock did not help my speed.

So I was excited to find this little speed reading test on the Staples site.  It is designed to help you figure out which ereader you would get the most books read on a single battery charge.

The first time I took this test with 12pt font I read less than 300.  I think it was even less than 250--and I still failed the comprehension questions.  All three.  Then I zoomed my browser until the fonts appeared approximate 14 to 16pt and tried again.  And my speed increased to just under 500.  I went from 20% slower than the average adult to 96% faster.

It is still only half the speed I once read but I'll take it and smile.

This drop in reading speed is the fallout from the RP that is taking my eyesight one pixil at a time.

Not only was reading so much slower with tree books but I couldn't read for as long either.  Usually after less than thirty minutes I would need to rest my eyes and so often once I'd put the book down I didn't pick it up again for hours or days.  That was so frustrating.

Last night I started The Hunger Games after midnight and I almost finished it before I had to sleep.  It has been a long time since I came that close to reading a whole book of that length and difficulty level in under 6 hours.  I still haven't finished it as there was so much else going on today.

I can't wait until the next read-a-thon!!!  I might actually be able to list multiple finishes.

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Sunday Serenity #274

LOL

ROFLOL

 Thought it was fitting to post a Sunday Serenity featuring cats since it is March, the month my Grimlyn passed in 2007 on the Sunday after St. Paddy Day and threatened to ruin Sundays for me forever. It was a few weeks after that when I decided to start doing Sunday Serenity posts in order to make Sundays about more than reminding me to grieve.

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Collapsing the Box

This is an awesome demonstration of creative think.  So outside the box you can't see it anymore.

Designer Kelly Anderson challenges us to question our assumptions and then proceeds to demonstrate three of her projects in which she questioned the assumptions about the uses and attributes of common everyday paper products and then designed something that startled and awoke wonder inn the recipient.

She didn't just exit the box she collapsed it...Maybe just for a short time from moments to minutes but the ripple effect of that reassessing has incalculable impact on the culture in which it is set loose into.

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Words Matter Week 2012

Leave it to me to discover a week long event on the evening of its last day.  This is a yearly event for bloggers held the first full week of March each year.  Each day M-F a prompt is presented and anyone wishing to write on its theme may and then link back to the hub blog.  There are prizes too.

This year the prompts were:

Monday:  Writers craft words into memorable phrases, stories, poems and plays.  What writers make your heart sing?  Why?

Gabrielle Garcia Marquez because his stories are like waking dreams that seem to arise out of my own dreams or maybe it is truer to say that my dreams rise up to greet his stories as long lost companions.

Maya Angelou because her poems and stories are the fruit cultivated in the soil of pain and despair fertilized with hope and courage.  Her words teach me the meaning of 'overcome'.

Flannery O'Conner because her stories confront me with the damaged aspects of my psyche and their propensity to commit terrible acts of violence against the spirit and body of self and other.  Forewarned is forearmed so many such acts can be avoided but her stories also speak of the power and hope in redemption for those occasions when failure to heed the warning leads to the inevitable gross acts of unkindness towards ones self and those lives interacting with our own.

Tuesday:  What word, said or unsaid, has or could change your life?  How?

Forgive.  Because whether it is I who has offended another or they who have offended me, the word forgive spoken from the heart has the power to mend fractured relationships and strengthen the fabric of family and community.  We all offend in many large and small ways every day and without the ability to forgive others and ourselves and to accept the forgiveness of others the weight of guilt, shame, resentment  and anger would crush out souls and smother our sanity.  Living with the habit of forgiveness makes living in joy and harmony possible.

Wednesday:  Communication breaks down when words are misused.  What is the funniest or worst breakdown you’ve ever observed?

The words were misheard rather than misused but just this evening I thought my mom asked me to turn the light out here in her bedroom and in a bit of a shocked tone I told her the light was already out and was about ask if she really couldn't tell as I wondered if this was what she meant when she complained the last few days that her eyes were going fast.

But before I could voice my jumbled thoughts she spoke again, enunciating carefully with her dentureless mouth through the apnea machine mask, saying that she meant it was OK for me to turn the light back on if I needed to while I cleared off my side of the bed.

That may not be the funniest instance I've ever observed just the most recent.

There have been a number of challenges to communication with my mom in the years since her stroke what with her issues with mild aphasia and both hers and my hearing loss and vision loss.  Some have been as amusing as this one.  Some not so much.

Thursday:  What Person in your life helped you understand the importance of choosing words carefully?  What would you say to them if you met them today?

My great aunt who had been a teacher and a teacher of teachers in her day once caught me with a thesaurus at the tender age of thirteen and she was dismayed.  She said one didn't have the right to use words one found in such lists of synonyms without knowing them already.  She stressed that it wasn't safe to just plug in any word in the entry as there were subtle and not so subtle differences in meaning and it was the writer's responsibility to know those subtleties and select the word best suited to the thought they are trying to convey.

I am totally paraphrasing as her actual words are vague in my memory.  Still vivid tho is her disapproval.  And even though I didn't really get all the subtleties of her points then it primed me for later understanding.  And over the several years she had left to influence my life she took every chance to share her love of words with me.  Playing Scrabble was one such way.  But she also introduced me to crossword puzzles and the stories of individual words in their etymology and history of use.

If she and I could speak today I'd tell her thank you, many thanks, much obliged, so appreciated, I'm so grateful, gramercy, thankee,  thank you kindly, merci, merci beaucoup, danke, danke schon, gracias, grazie, spasibo Auntie Rie.

Friday:  If you had to eliminate one word or phrase from the English language, what would it be?  Why?

Indifference.  Because, assuming as Orwell did in his novel 1984 that elimination of the word eliminates that which it references,  then indifference itself would be history.  And it is my belief that indifference is the root of all evil not the love of money.  For indifference is the polar opposite of love and passion.  It is worse than hate in that it cannot be moved and while hate is to be eschewed its presence bespeaks the capacity of its bearer for passion and thus also for compassion.  While indifference stands by as vile acts are perpetrated upon the innocent, weak and vulnerable, making no effort to alleviate distress since the distress of others cannot touch one who can't be stirred to care.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Script Frenzy

Script Frenzy

Less than a month until Script Frenzy starts.  I've been debating with myself whether I would participate this year.  Everything is so topsy-turvey  and if I'm going to write I'd rather write on my stories.  But I think I would eventually feel like I was missing out on something if I don't.  I don't stress Script Frenzy in the same way I do NaNoWriMo.  I've always approached it as an exercise for learning a new aspect of my craft--storytelling.  I have participated the last three years and have yet to accumulate more than twenty odd pages but I came away feeling I had learned a lot each time.

I had expected to be back at home before it was time to start preparing for Script Frenzy.  Each year except my first in 2009 I've spent most of March preparing--choosing the story, studying the formatting rules, practicing with Celtix, reading library books on script writing, reading scripts.  And pretty much that just continued into April.  I learned today that my trip home has been postponed yet again. For possibly two weeks and for sure at least one.  So my vague notion of waiting until I got back home to even start thinking about it no long serves.  I need to decide if I'm going to and if so which story and whether to send for more library books.

My first year in 2009, I didn't start from scratch with a new story but was adapting one of my short stories.  I just might go that same route this year.  Or multiple stories if I finish one and am still under 100 pages.  That would take the least amount of prep work which works better for while I'm still at Mom's and have so many other commitments.

The story I worked with in 2009 was Of Cats and Claws and Curiosities.  So that leaves these four completed stories to choose from:  

How Does Your Garden Grow?  part 1 part 2

Running in Circles   part 1 part 2

Blow Me a Candy Kiss   part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4; part 5;

Making Rag Doll Babies and Million Dollar Maybes  ~ Part One ~ Part Two ~ Part Three ~Part Four ~ Part Five~ Part Six ~ Part Seven ~ Part Eight ~ Part Nine ~Part Ten ~ Part Eleven

The last one features many of the same characters as Of Cats and Claws and is probably long enough to get me all the way to 100 pages assuming I make it that far.  But it would probably take all three of the others and even then may not be enough.

The links are to the 'snippets' I posted for Friday Snippets several years ago.  The stories are complete though.  You can find the links to Of Cats and the many incomplete stories on the post I've dubbed my Fruits of the Spirit Storyworld Portal

Which of the above stories would you like to see as a film?

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Finding Katie by John J Smith: Book Review

Finding Katie

by John J. Smith

John J Smith has a knack for creating eccentric well rounded characters.   In Delayed Flight there was the waitress at the airport that I was especially fond of But Finding Katie is swarming with them.  I'm charmed by eccentric characters because they always surprise me which gets harder to do as the decades go by.

The protagonist, Preston Meadows, himself is quite eccentric.  In his mid twenties, he works for his wealthy father and lives in the basement of the family home.  He has been so sheltered from the outside world he needs to be prepared for an excursion into it as one who is traveling in a foreign country without knowledge of its language or customs.  He is a genius and an empath which is what makes him so valuable to his father's business.

When his older sister Katie, a professor, is kidnapped he insists on looking for her himself.  And that's when the other characters begin taking the stage.  Some briefly, like the cab driver on the first day who thinks Preston must be the Devil  after he catches him cheating on the fare by using his GPS and the rate posted in the car to figure out what he should have been charged.  The driver gets out of his cab screaming and causes a several car pileup.

Then there is the woman who runs the homeless shelter that takes him in, an ex-addict with a mouth on her to make a sailor blush.  The shelter itself is full of eccentrics. There's the woman who works in the shelter kitchen who sings like an angel.  There are the overweight twenty-something woman and the young transvestite who are always vying over the same potential beaus.  They have knock-down drag-out fights over Preston who of course has no interest in either as he's besotted with an illegal immigrant whose brother is a minion of the same gang leader who has Katie.  There is the member of the rival gang who mistakenly believes that Preston is responsible for an injury he sustained and spends the entire novel trying to get even only to have each attempt backfire and boomerang back onto him.  There are many more.  Too many to list in a short review.

The action of the story is one fumbling, bumbling Keystone Coppish episode after another as Preston moves through the days attracting accidents and anger nearly always unscathed as bullets fly, cars explode, fists and Molotov cocktails are thrown, ladders fall, a squirrel steals nuts from Preston's bedside table then leads him on a chase to the roof and a 'vicious' attack dog is persistently distracted by his indiscriminate sex addiction.

The beginning is a bit slow but once Preston has left home the action picks up and there is one laugh-out-loud scene after another.  The young man who was so socially awkward at the beginning he could have been mistaken for someone with Asperger's syndrome has by the end not only made friends, fallen in love and become an integral member of the small community at the shelter, he has found the courage to break out of that family basement living mindset and to defy the father who'd kept him dependent in order to use his son's special talents to enlarge his wealth.

The story was a rollicking good time and I'd like to see sequels with Preston as the accidental detective solving crime with his unique blend of genius, uncanny luck and telepathic abilities.

John J. Smith

Finding Katie Tour Schedule

                                (G)Giveaway?(I)Interview  

Tour Host:      Post,                 Date of review:               (GP)Guest 

Katrina Page Flipperz                       Mar. 2                   None

Crystal My Reading Room Blog        Mar. 6                   G & GP Mar. 8           

Vicki I'd Rather Be At the Beach     Mar. 5                    G

Joy Joy Story                                   Mar. 7                   None

Kari From the TBR Pile                   Mar. 8                   G

Theresa Frugal Experments              Mar. 9                   GP Mar. 9

Pamela Thoughts in Progress           Mar. 11                  G & GP Mar. 7

Patty Books, Thoughts..                   Mar. 12                  G

Jackie Housewife Blues                   Mar. 13                  G  Mar. 18th

Chris Redding, Author                      None                     Excerpt Mar. 14

Donna's Home Blog                         Mar. 14                  I Mar. 15

Fran Vampyre Gurls Book Club         Mar. 15                G & GP Mar. 16

Amy's Book World                            Mar. 19                GP & G Mar. 20

Kathryn Mysteries Etc.                     Mar. 21                 None

Courtney Crunchy Beach Mama        Mar. 22                 G

Lucy Moonlight Gleam's Bookshelf    Mar. 23                 None   

Reviews by Molly                             Mar. 26                  G

Lisa Alive on the Shelves                  None                      I Mar.27

Yvonne Socrates' Book Review         Mar. 27                  G

Brenda WV Stitcher                          Mar. 28                  None

Donna My Life                                 Mar. 29                   G &GP Mar. 30

http://www.virtualauthorbooktours.com/

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So PayPal Wants To Be Our 16th Century PaPa?

What's next?  Pope?

PayPal has notified Smashwords and other online ebook distributors used by indie authors that they will deactivate the accounts of these sites if books with certain content are not taken down and banned.  Granted the content in question elicits a guttural  'eeeeeew!' from me:  errotica featuring bestiality, rape, incest or underage sex.

But that's not the point.  The point is we neither want nor need our credit card company or bank arbitrating what we read, write or buy.

If they can do this to Smashwords how do we little ol bloggers stand against them when they come after us?

Which they already have if you use ad networks to monitize your blog for they are already threatening withdrawal of service to them if they refuse to pull their ads off of offensive websites.

Offensive to who?  Who decides?  Who polices?

So no PayPal, no credit card payment processing, no ad service?  How long can an income generating website stay viable under those conditions?  Not long.  And that's the point of course.

This is a whole new league of censorship as it is not covered by the constitutional protections since PayPal and the credit card companies, banks and other financial institutions whose rules PayPal claims to be adhering to are not government institutions.  So ostensibly, as private companies they have the right to set whatever rules they like.

What this boils down to is yet another instance of Wall Street lording it over those they deem serfs.  It's yet another way they control behavior in the economy by controlling the flow of funds.  So much for their vaunted belief in the free market.

Read more about it:

At EFF: Legal Censorship: PayPal Makes a Habit of Deciding What Users Can Read
At NCAC: NCAC, ABFFE Protest PayPal Ban on Erotic Material
At Smashwords:  Press Release [scroll down to PayPal Censorship]
At Techdirt: Paypal Pressured To Play Morality Cop And Forces Smashwords To Censor Authors
At Change.org  Petition

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The Fog of Words

see more Lolcats and funny pictures,

It was just recently brought to my attention that I have a habit that is fatal for my stories.

It was on Melissa Douthit's blog where she quotes Neil Gaiman about writing:

It's a weird thing, writing.

Sometimes you can look out across what you're writing, and it's like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer's day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you'll be going on your walk.

And that's wonderful.

Sometimes it's like driving through fog. You can't really see where you're going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you're probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you'll still get where you were going.

And that's hard while you're doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn't exist in that order down on paper, half of what you'd get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.

And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you're doing and where you're going, and you couldn't see or know any of that five minutes before.

And that's magic.

My fatal habit?

When I find myself in the fog of the middle of a story I don't keep driving. And what is even worse, I kill the engine.  Which not only stops all movement forward but douses the lights as well.

And then I wait for the fog to lift.

And wait.  And wait.

Meanwhile tying my mind into a pretzel of twisted hope and fear.

Not only does the fog not lift but the wilderness to either side reclaims the road and a tangle of vines envelopes the car winding around the engine and wending its way inside to wrap my limbs and face, immobilizing and blinding me so that I can see neither the fog nor the vines nor the car.  They are the reflection of the tangle that is the story in my mind.

Once this has happened is it too late for the story?  Do I need to abandon it?

But I could no more abandon it than I could my own child.

So maybe that means forging ahead through the fog on foot with my trusty white cane to feel for the edge of the road and my crochet hook to crochet the vines into an orderly hedge.

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Sunday Serenity #273

 Suzanne Ciani:  Go Gently

Love this.  I think I'll be exploring for more  of Ciani.

Today was the last day of my 2.5 days home alone with Mom while my sister was out of town from before dawn to way past dusk.

Tomorrow I need to start packing.  Though I'm not leaving until Saturday I have my stuff scattered all over this house in living room, laundry room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and office.  A challenging task.

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The Weigh It Is

see more Lolcats and funny pictures,

I learned this week that I've lost 17 pounds during my stay at Mom's.  I barely noticed it happening.  I hardly feel I can take any credit.  My sister shops and menu plans based on the Jorge Cruise Belly Fat Diet.  I eat what's prepared for me except for those days when I'm the preparer.  But in that case I'm still using one of the recipes from Jorge's book.

I'm now at a weight lower than I've been in twenty years.  If you add what I lost last summer and did not gain back, I've lost 32 pounds in 8 months.

I've not made an issue of my weight here before and currently have no plans to make it a regular feature but I just had to tell someone.

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Happy 108th Dr. Seuss.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures, 

“My alphabet starts with this letter called yuzz. 

It's the letter I use to spell yuzz-a-ma-tuzz. 

You'll be sort of surprised what there is to be found 

once you go beyond 'Z' and start poking around!”

To honor Dr. Suess I leave you with the LOLcat, some quotes and some links.  Enjoy.

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”

“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the things you can think up if only you try!”

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.”

“I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!”


“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own.
And you know what you know. You are the guy who'll decide where to go.”


“And will you succeed? Yes indeed, yes indeed! Ninety-eight and three-quarters percent guaranteed!”

“I know up on the top you are seeing great sights, but down at the bottom we, too, should have rights.

“A person's a person, no matter how small.”

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.”


“"I'm sorry to say
so but, sadly it's true
that bang-ups and hang-ups
can happen to you"”


“You're in pretty good shape for the shape you are in.”

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities.”

http://www.catinthehat.org/history.htm

http://www.seussville.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss

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Book Review: The Red Church by Scott Nicholson

The Red Church

by Scott Nicholson

Many of the families living in this small town in the southern Appalachia Mountains have lived here for centuries.  They are insular and suspicious of both outsiders and each other and secrets fester in hearts and soil.  Which might have something to do with a violent act of betrayal by several families against one of their own.  With each generation weaned on the stories  they carry a burden of guilt priming them for the sermons of a preacher with a message of salvation through the shedding of blood.  "Sacrifice is the currency of God." he says.

Two intrepid locals, 13 year old Ronnie Day and Sheriff Frank Littlefield each have reasons for wanting to avoid the red church by the river.  But Ronnie must walk past it on his way to and from school each day and Littlefield must drive past it daily in the course of his duties.

Ronnie senses the ominous presence of the Bell Tower Monster, a local legend said to have wings and claws and livers for eyes.  It is bad enough having to walk past it twice a day but now his mother wants him to attend midnight mass with her.

Sheriff Littlefield's memory of the worst day of his life is revived each time he lays eyes on the church--the day his little brother died in a fall off the roof while playing a prank on Frank's high school friends.  A prank Frank had instigated.  A prank that drew its effectiveness from the legend of the thing said to haunt the bell tower.  The thing with wings and claws and livers for eyes.  Frank works hard theses days to not remember the dark shadow he saw rise up behind his brother in the bell tower just before he fell.

Ronnie and his little brother find the first body in the church yard after his brother Tim is attracted by the glint of sun flashing off something in the cemetery as they walk past on their way home from school and darts in to check it out forcing Ronnie to come after him.  More bodies follow.  Each one a descendant of one of the families who had perpetrated the ancient betrayal.  Each one gruesomely mutilated.  Each one missing a different major organ.

Scott Nicholson tells a soul shivering story that won't let go.  Not even after you turn the last page.  And he does so with a prose that sings like poetry. I will be reading more Nicholson.  I'm so glad I participated in his recent promo, The Epic Kindle Giveaway, during which I was able to download more than a dozen of his ebooks.

Find out more about Scot Nicholson's stories or his previous website The Haunted Computer

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