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Showing posts from January, 2013

baked good

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After the angst comes baking of the comfort food. We're looking for easy peasy because we're gloomy, not creative, at the moment. Except--hold on--I was creative enough to come up with a recipe yesterday. You must start out with a nearly empty jar of Trader Joe's morello cherries in light syrup. Put a bunch of the cherries in something like a pie. Be left with about a cup of cherries bobbing around in lot of that syrup. Because you're cheap and those cherries are pricey, feel reluctant to dump the light syrup. (I use it to reconstitute dried fruit too--simmer dried fruit with the stuff) Ok, recipe time. 1 box of white cake mix, minus 6 Tbl (you can probably go for the whole box, but ours was missing 6 Tbl used in another recipe) 1 cup of TJ left over light cherry syrup (a bit more if you have a whole box of mix) 1/4 cup oil (a bit more if you have a whole box) 3 eggs. left over cherries (about a cup, or more if you have more) Put it all in the mixer and le

Just Asking

If you were going to reinvent yourself, how would you do it? This part is important: you're female and no longer young, so you're not in demand sexually. You're invisible to anyone who doesn't know you, and to nearly everyone who does know you. That means any reinvention has to come internally. If you believe in God, do you ask him to do the heavy lifting? If you don't, to whom do you appeal? Would you start with something easy, like chopping off and dying your hair? (This is for your own view of yourself, remember.) Would you walk away from EVERYTHING or just parts of your life? How would you decide which bits to leave behind and which to keep? How discontent do you have to be to take action? Would you make lists? Would you ask friends? What if you don't have friends like that? Would you read books? Which books? How soon would you give up because you're a coward? Or is it because you're lazy? Or maybe you're not unhappy enough? How

Breaking up

It's been coming on for a couple of years, I guess. You know how it hurts when someone you care about disses you? You spend hours trying to solve it, allowing encounters, conversations to run over and over the mental gerbil wheel until you feel sick or, occasionally, come up with a solution. Yeah, none of that is happening here. I think it's when you didn't answer my first email that I started to wonder if we'd reached the end of our years-long relationship. I just sent my third and even if you do answer, I wonder....this might be enough.  The end seriously started with a misunderstanding--on my part, I apologize. Then you were supposed to say, oh that's okay, Kate. Naw, RWA, I wasn't surprised you did NOT say "even though your writing partner isn't a member, we'll let your book stay in the contest," even after I offered to pay the higher non-member fee. Hey, I could have sworn Bonnie was a member. I thought I saw her in a group RWA

Late, but doing Marie Treanor's bidding

THE NEXT BIG THING I got tagged by about six people, all writers who'd been tagged.  We're talking chain letter promo. I first jumped on and agreed to do it a week after Marie Treanor. I must have meant TWO weeks after. I'm honored that so many people thought to include me in the Next Big Thing T ag- Y ou're- I t party. I can't think of who else to tag, unfortunately. The buck is stopping here. More like petering out...the end of the line. The last of the great big things.  What is the working title of your book?  Kenway and Gerard. I'm writing it with Bonnie Dee. That won't be the title. Where did the idea come from for the book? A panic attack. I was having one and thought it would be interesting i f it was actually attached to something real, instead of bad chemicals. So one of our characters has them every time he goes to his family home in the country.  What genre does your book fall under?  m/m historical  Whic

true regret

Yesterday, as I did my quarterly whine**, I tried to think of actual actions I regret, careerwise.  There are a few lost opportunities, stories that could have used more work, dumb moves, that kind of thing. But I only got a true pang of regret when I remembered the guy I interviewed about 20 years ago. Back then, I worked for local magazines and newspapers (one of which still exists wowee). I wrote free-lance until I got a job as an editor. I wrote dozens? hundreds? of articles during my feature article years. I interviewed all sorts of people--bee-keepers, collectors, athletes, politicians, movers-and-shakers, bankers, acrobats, a real cowboy, Billy Ripken, artists, actors, writers, chicken farmers, crooks, Other Women, home-schoolers, police officers, judges, lawyers.... Regrets. Right. When I think about all those interviews, two stand out: one with a woman lived in Frederick in the 1940s and another with a man who'd stormed Normandy during D-Day. I was supposed to writ

haven't we heard this before? does it help?

Whine no one buys my books anymore stop writing then. Whine what else am I supposed to do? Mike suggested being a greeter at Walmart and he wasn't kidding. I'm not qualified to do squat. I'm too old to be a waitress. then keep writing. Whine but I'm not making enough money then get a part time job Whine but there's nothing out there and I've looked. why are you so unsympathetic? you know I go into these declines every now and then. Particularly at holiday times when everyone says make goals! improve your life!  and what do these introspection moments do for you? anything? Whine they make me take stock of my life. hey, admit it. your life is pretty good, right?  whine it's okay, except for the writing. and the occasional glitches in the life and the being fat part. No, stop, I don't want to hear about that . fine, we'll stick to the writing. you like the writing. you even sort of enjoyed editing that godawfulbookfromhell l