Knit and Wit

I am knitting up a storm and it has been zenlike. The peace and calm of slowly making something is unlike watching television, which was my usual pastime. I was told men do not knit. Well thier loss.There is so much out there online to learn. Videos help me the most because I guess it is easier seeing it done than long explanations. And it is much easier than I would have ever dreamed to do. Ribbing tickles me, it is like bong! It is so elastic. It is what holds up your socks people! Wow. You can have that cardigan blue and orange if you want it(I happen to love blue and orange) or any color when you make it yourself. When I lived is Alabama blue and orange were Auburn University colors and people thought I was supporting the football team. No, just love the color combination. But yarn is expensive as I have discovered. Who would have thunk making something yourself would cost more? I confess I pass on the cheap acrylic and run to cashmere and angora because I love it! Soft as a child's sweet dream and drapes besutifully. Mmmm... what to make next?

The Newbie's Guide to Publishing

This blog is one I like. This guy is something of a perfectionist and a moralist. We should not ask friends to post reviews of our book on Amazon and things like that. I personally don't think all the reviews in the world will help a bad book, just ruin somebody's day. If however your book is good then okay. Who however is objective when it comes to their own work? Writers tend to think every word is solid gold. If you do have questions he answers them clearly. One of the things I always wanted to know is how much a writer makes, and boy does he answer that question! You get a clear idea of what is possible and how publishing works. It is a great blog. He appears to be the hardest working author on the planet. His heroine in Whiskey Sour is a person who is driven to do one thing above all else, catch the killer. In that way she is like the author himself. (These books are like the Stephanie Plum novels and just as fun to read) The theme is to relax a little and stop and smell the roses, something the author appears to be telling himself!
      The authors name is J. Konrath and he sells books on his blog and on Amazon. You're welcome.

Economize

I have a friend who cannot quit his job, even though he is far past retirement age. He has too much to pay! He has satellite television, a car payment and medical bills. (I still don't understand how inflation is making medical bills skyrocket upwards and how that can bankrupt the country. I get this picture of all the people that work in the medical profession having all the money and the rest of us are begging on street corners.) This is what is going to happen to our generation. Unable to retire, we continue to work. Well, with stocks doing the hutchie coochie and interest rates rock bottom would you want to buy an IRA right now? This favors spending. We are supposed to spend our money and save the economy. If people would only spend they lament on CNN. What is that supposed to mean?
Okay, think on this. One of the first rules of contract law is that both parties have to understand the agreement before signing. Who of us understands our credit card contract? The mission in this is to mislead, if not downright cheat. What about the lottery? Here is another case of those ill-equipped to handle money recieving it, after the IRS gets a big chunk and the place that sold the winning ticket gets some. It seems very bad to lift someone up and give them no help. Remember watching My Fair Lady and thinking how unfair it was that he had raised her up from her social station and then dumped her back on the street she came from? Isn't this essentially the same thing?
What we do is never eat out at restaurants. Never, never, never. I find myself crazy seeing ads on television and tell myself it is not as good as it looks. What in advertising ever is? Discover the joys of squash, the meat replacing power of beans, the way to cook bacon in the oven ( and watch like a hawk ). I find myself blown away by the simple tip that water will boil faster if you put a lid on it. Wow, this really works. My tip is the noble large lima bean. My mother thought this was absolutely necessary to eat every night and I fought the taste by covering them with ketchup. Time however has brought wisdom and a pound of dried beans and one strip of bacon will in due course produce a masterpiece that mashed up with cornbread makes me happy. You cannot ruin this. If the water gets low and the mixture is thick, add water. It is this soup, this marvelous spoonfuls of flavor spiced with a little pork, that is delicious so add water generously. So much food for so little and I never miss the meat.
So who for president, I for one do not know. I can read articles that make me like Romney and articles that shine a lustrous light on Obama. One thing I do think is that government is a business, although a poorly run one everyone seems to agree. On that basis I like Romney. Obama is like a dream that seems impossible. Can we really provide medical care for all? This sounds like a fantasy spun from the other side of reality. I like it, I just don't think we can have it.
Let whoever be president it doesn't seem to matter. I think a downward trend is where we are going.
But hey,. what do I know?

Noble Romance

This publisher is offering advances and asking for anything, literally anything. Click submissions once you get there if you are writing romances, and us women if we are not writing them, we are reading them.
I gave some thought to the idea that we have to support our authors by buying books. I usually get my books at the library but I bought Dean Koontz's new book, Shadow Street. The book was the usual from the master of disaster and murder however after reading his newsletter and his website I think sometimes he should write comedy. An author who always works hard, this book still reminded me of someone else, Stephen King. Harlequin sent me some books but I found the language stumbling and the heroines a bit stupid. I am wanting a heroine who is smart and can make things happen! Those are the ones I love. Happy reading.

Preston and Child

I have read every book by these 2 authors I can get my hands on. I've always been interested in science and these guys are up to the task in their writing. I, who have perhaps read too many books, have grown bored with books in which I know what is going to happen. With these guys you can't guess usually anyway.
They created a sort of James Bond character named Pendergast, but he really isn't like Bond. He reminds you of Bond with his abilities and the fact that he is wealthy and an F.B.I. agent. He is not handsome for one thing and young women don't fall all over his path. What he does is bring the quality of brains to the story.
In one story he meets a girl in a hick town who is the town "Goth" and the town's reject. What can you expect when her mother is a drunk and she has no father and a filthy trailer to call home? At the end of the novel he tells her how he has registered her for school and giving her money which she at first refuses. He then tells her the money was obtained illegally by a member of his family and he wishes to help the family name by doing good deeds with the money. But I am a freak! she cries and he tells her that he is one too and he did well and so could she, but she had to get out of this town, the town was killing her.
I thought it was art, the way he summed everything up that way. Yes Pendergast is a freak, an albino with snow white hair and strange ways and who finds it difficult to say thank you to anyone but he has found a way to live with it. Intelligent people are often freaks. I think he is alluding here to the fact that people tend to pigeonhole you, and she needed to get out of the town to start a new life because you can never get away from your box they put you in. I live in a small town and they have their ways and one must adapt of course. It can cause the worst kind of claustrophobia, my daughter couldn't wait to get out of town in spite of the fact she has dear friends here.
Pendergast chasing murderers, and I am bit tired of them it's the only fiction I can find much of that I like. The attraction is I think that people find it tantalizing that someone they know is in disguise, for someone among them was capable of murder. It's the social mask, what evil does it hide? It appears from the many murders that go unsolved, it hides a lot.

Arabic Lots

Dreamhouse Attic is a site with a great deal of the arabic lots, this is a sort of formula using the Ascendant of your astrology chart. Finding money in the chart is a pastime I seem to never tire of, so my fav is the Lot of Wealth. Destiny seems to have plowed a course and left this birth chart of mine to remember it by, for it seems all things were foreshadowed and if the ancients thought one day they could predict everyone's life, well millions have been spent trying to predict the weather. What we find is that the weather cannot be predicted, it can be linked to probabilities and that is exactly what astrology is. To be sure I have felt the jealousies of Venus in Scorpio and a great deal of puzzlement has been with me as to why I, the least jealous of all people should find myself so fiercely jealous when it comes to my love life. It has been said the percentage of correct prediction is 84 percent, which isn't bad. I try to change myself, self-improve myself and have been ever since elementary school when no one liked me. Yet with this comes the question of why, since these things were not linked to my personality or some lack in myself although I do have lacks of course but rather to my family messing up my life with great impact and ignorance of that fact. Still a malignant mother and a teacher getting her revenge on my family is not good luck, is it? Authority of all kinds has failed me, parents, teachers, policemen, bosses. I do not see this in my astrology chart but somehow I don't doubt it is there. With astrology everything is explained, and it does so beautifully.
Those who follow astrology usually do so because their lives are so very bad that they start searching for answers. It seems horrible to have such bad luck, but it is better at least to feel you understand it. I myself have planets without essential dignities which means to talk without tact, to be quarrelsome, to be always butting ones head against authority. So it has been, but I still feel that is right to do so. It seems sad somehow to blend in and yet I long for it like sunshine in the winter. It is sad to melt into the crowd and be forgotten, but somehow I think we are forgotten anyway.

Writing

As joyful as it can be to write when you want to the opposite is true if you don't want to. It seems that everyone wants to do it and to learn how to do it but it is about a huge investment in time, discipline, and faith. Where does one find the confidence to chose a path anyway? There are so many options.
They tell me the public brought paranormal to the fore, but the many half vampire, half werewolf, half of somethings make me cringe. It's almost as if we've got this new material but we've got to do the same things with it. We go for newness but somehow we can't arrive. Newness must arrive with the person themselves, who they are and what they think and what they write cannot be separated. I get these impressions from the huge amount of reading that I do, almost a book a day and no, I am not joking. What I get is a tiredness of this glut of stories, a sense of sameness, that I'm reading the same thing over and over. What I want is unpredictability in story even as it is in life. The thing that books did for me when I was between being a child and an adult doesn't happen now. This overwhelming sense of possibility.
Being a writer is an odd thing, people study it and even so I don't think it has parameters. The simple telling of story seems to be enormously complicated.
NEVER start a story with a character waking up.
NEVER change point of view
NEVER start with It was a dark and stormy night unless you are Snoopy the dog.
NEVER have the main character be the murderer or an awful person.
NEVER tell a characters dream in detail
NEVER use the passive voice, actually this is very useful.
NEVER use exclamation points.
NEVER have the answer be aliens did it unless things are exceedingly odd all around during the story.
NEVER forget to enclose a self addressed postage paid envelope
NEVER call editors constantly or make a pest of yourself. I'm told publishing is a small world.
NEVER use colored paper or confetti or perfumed paper.
NEVER have characters on drugs or depict drugs in any other way than dangerous, deadly, and unsavory
NEVER say love does not exist. Make those dreams come true at least on the page.
I think it wise to remember that people who do read like some wordplay and things of that nature because they love words. That's why they are reading.
This is a list of advice I've read or been given. It is not I who is wise and know these things. I do however, cook a mean fried chicken.