Comments

It's been pointed out to me that one could not post comments to my blog without being a blog owner. This has been fixed although you will have to type in the weird numbers and letters called word verification to prevent all the casino ads, penis enlargement promises, and other spam.

Internal writing

I had an interesting question posed to me the other night (at my fun birthday party). My friend asked me how I get time to write with a two-year old in my life. I answered that I can write anything, anytime and what I meant was that I don't always write but when I do get the time and the urge, I can spew out a lot at a sitting without much trouble. A lot of it may be crap but it does come. I think it is because I have a variety of projects on the go at any one time and the fact that I do a lot of internal writing.

Huh? I can hear you say. Internal writing? Let me explain. I don't write daily in that I don't sit down with pen and paper or Alphasmart Neo and produce actual writing that anyone else can read. I do, however, write in my head. On any one day in my head there can be numerous worlds, a bunch of conversations, and various "scenes" that I can see. People live in there so by the time I get a chance to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, they come out and all the conversations they've had and situations they've been in, just pour onto the page without my having much control over them at all. I become a stenographer for them and I record what they do or say, laughing with them if they are funny and crying with them if they are sad. It is as if I am reading someone else's writing and reacting to it that way.

The truth is that if I do get the chance to write a lot, I end up creating more and more of those "scenes" in my head to the point that it is hard to live in the real world. I snap at my husband and lose patience with my child because they are interrupting these other worlds of mine. Sounds like a mental illness, I know but it's true. On the flip side, if I don't get to write them out of my head from time to time, they pile up and the same thing can happen. Everyone has a different way to write. There are some like me while others need a schedule and a time of day to write every day. Some often have large chunks of time every day like eight hours a day. My husband says that if I wrote eight hours a day, we couldn't afford the mass of paper I would create. The truth is that I would probably go insane. So, I'll stick to it this way for now. Maybe those other people have to have their work perfect as they write it and I don't write that way. My motto is that you have to get the clay on the table. More about that on another day.

Big day today

So, today is my birthday and I am turning a big number, you know one of those with a zero at the end of it. The one between 30 and 50 to be exact. So, how does that feel? I'm having a party Sat night so I'm looking forward to that. I think that I am happier right now (knock wood, knock wood) than at any other time in my life so that's good. And then I look on Chapters and lo and behold, there's my book. Can't order it yet but it's there and so yahoo.

My philosophy on birthdays, big or small, has always been that it is better than the alternative. My Mom asked me last weekend what I thought about getting to this big number and I said "thank God I got there". I know friends along the way who did not get here and I know they would have wanted to so, yeah, this feels good, very good in fact and I'll take it with thanks. I say bring on the next forty.

Post May 24th

Ah, another May 24th come and gone. Same old, same old for us. Out home to Aspen Cove and Ladle Cove, shuffling our son back and forth with the futile hope that each set of grandparents will get equal time with him. The weather sucked but isn't that what May 24th is all about? Drank a bit, chatted a bit, hung out a lot. Slept in (thanks Mom and Dad for getting up with the boy).

The drive in and out is what's the killer, especially with a panting, drooling dog and a two year old boy . Our son is amazingly patient on the four plus hour drive but eventually I know we will succumb to sanity and get a DVD player for the car to entertain him. Something tells me that I shouldn't because we didn't have them and my parents trekked us across the island to visit grandparents without a DVD player and we were okay. At least I think we were. Then again, we were stretched out across the backseat and pretty mobile in the car since car seats were nonexistent and seat belts were not an issue. If we had seatbelts, I didn't know about it. My son is confined to his little car seat the whole way with straps tight across his chest and lap. So things change. Maybe a DVD player is not out of the question after all. We'll see.

Popular pacman

A local guy has created a pacman-like game where Taylor Hicks is pacman and he is going after the other idol contestants. If you look at the bottom of the page you'll see that it has been carried by American news networks and other media.

Spam titles

I keep some of my spam email in a special folder. It is not the spam itself, invariably consisting of advice on either stocks I don't want or how to increase the size of my nonexistent penis. No, it's the titles that turn my crank. I get such a kick out of them. Obviously some spam software somewhere takes random words and puts them together to form crazy subject lines. Some of them have "Re:" on the front of them, as if I had already had conversations with someone about things like "waterless bald mountain". Of course, none of them make any sense but it is the odd mixing of these words that sometimes sounds poetic, dramtic, intriguing or just plain silly. I give you a sampling:

• I ask no just
• Re: To stand no lollipop headfirst
• it spend as dandy propitiate
• Which smoke go lascivious
• Re: As cut as bespoke blueprint
• Re: Or hurt my antarctic realist
• Is type go bullfrog belay
• Re: Not turnoff the pane snapper
• Re: As reply to reopen deceased
• Re: Be live no undesirable fight
• And probably my very favourite:I explain by tonsillitis raving

So, what's in your spam folder?

Bird Flu Movie

It is tempting to watch ABC's made-for-TV movie Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America, airing tonight. It is tempting because I believe it would be an easy thing to make fun of. It is the kind of movie I could sit around and watch with a good bottle of red wine and laugh and poke fun. But I probably won't. I just don't have time right now to watch a movie purely to make fun of it.

With movies and television shows I have a roll-my-eyes rule. It is simple. If I roll my eyes three times during it, I should give it up. Such eye-rolling is purely involuntary. I have no control over it so I think it is a good test. When something horribly cliched or terribly written comes on the screen, my eyes just travel upward on their own accord and I note it.

Take for instance, ABC's recently premiered series What About Brian. I had a bad feeling about this show even though my husband said "oooh, that looks like a Tina Show" when we first saw the preview. He said it looked like Thirty Something, which I liked back in the day. But I saw cliches lining up at the door in the preview. I saw bad acting in that preview and I just knew. But I gave it a shot on the off chance that it was a great show in hiding. I rolled my eyes twice in the first segment but I still gave it a shot. Halfway through I started flicking around to other channels and never watched another episode. The season finale aired last night, after five episodes, so I think we can all bid adieu to Brian.

Then there was Derailed, a movie I rented this weekend. I didn't hate it and I didn't roll my eyes but I did find myself wishing the bloody thing would be over. This is never good in a movie. Well, I suppose if you can't wait for it to be over because it is so thrilling and you can't wait to find out what happens, that would be good for a movie. This was not the case with Derailed. I figured out the "twist" pretty early and I found the characters very unsympathetic. Hint to writers: don't make supporting characters sick/lovable/sympathetic and then have your main character cheat on them. So, if by some weird chance, you actually care about my opinion on Derailed, I say skip it.

Anyway, back to the Bird Flu movie. Why won't I give it a chance? At least give it as much of a chance as What About Brian. This movie made me roll my eyes four times in the preview (the clunky, boring name caused one eye-roll). I figure giving the whole movie a try could result in eye muscle damage so I'll skip it. Plus, I think this whole bird flu pandemic thing is garbage that will never happen and even if, by some slim chance, it does occur, do we need a dramatic enactment of how scary it will be? It's like Atomic Twister and 9.5 and all the other movies that come up with unlikely disasters, create one-dimensional characters for them, then let them play out. Just not worth my time. Not to mention the fact that it will cause even more insane panic than the media's shamelessly beating the "what if"s to death about the bird flu. So, I will give it a miss. Besides, the funniest show on TV, Scrubs, is on opposite it. Not even tempting really.

Blogdown

Alright, I haven't been doing great with this blogging thing, have I? I've been blogged down. The truth is that I've been very busy with final decisions on the book including the cover (check it out in my profile). Rhonda at Jesperson has done an amazing job on it. Then today was really nice, with a warm day and I decided to take some time to hang out with husband, son and dog while working on another column for the Independent. I could work outside on it thanks to my trusty Alphasmart Neo. I think I'll tell you more about that soon because it really is a great thing for any writer to have. Anyway, off to watch a movie (exciting Saturday night, hey? but I am grateful for this lull in what has been a very busy time). I rented Derailed starring Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen. I get a chance to watch it because husband has a Nascar night race to watch (I'm a Nascar widow). I'll let you know what I think of the movie. See, another topic. I'll get the hang of this blog thing eventually.

NaGeira book launch

Not much new to report. Went to a great book launch at Bianca's yesterday evening for Paul Butler's new book, NaGeira. It was a very nice time and congratulations to Paul on another great book.