No writer’s cafe today. I have family in from out of town so we drank too much coffee, talked too much, and went to the car museum.
I am in love. They have a 1967 Shelby GT 500, in Britney Blue. sigh
They also had multiple Dusenbergs. weep.
Was a good day but I am not getting any closer to finishing my novel audio reading, which means the editing is not getting nay closer to being done.
Frown. Perhaps tomorrow will bring more opportunities.
What a week it has been. My Father in law arrived very late Tuesday night with a truck full of antique furniture and other assorted physical memories of my husband’s life. Of course he had said he would arrived Wednesday night but that’s neither here nor there. LOL.
So I posted Wednesday very briefly, I was drunk and I didn’t want to fall into a long rambling drunk post. But I did no writing for Nano Wednesday or Thursday which meant this morning my word count was just above 4400, or behind. sigh. It was bound to happen at some point, right? But I thought it was ok because it’s Friday and Friday I go to a writers cafe, great chance to make up some word count. Only, I couldn’t get my kiddo out of the house. Do not underestimate the ability of a six year old boy to derail the best laid plans of mice and men.
Before you slap yourself on the forehead and say what is going on with this girl, let me throw in really quick I did write for an hour at home this morning and got 1060 words written. Not bad words either in my humble opinion.
Currently my total is 5462/5000. Ahead again. Tis a lovely place to be.
No excerpt today. I’m not on my laptop with scrivner on it. I’m borrowing my hubby’s laptop.
I missed it. My father in law came into town a day early. I spent the day unloading antique furniture he was giving to us and evening getting drunk with him. I can think of worse ways to spend a Wednesday.
But alas no cafe, no nano.
I bailed.
I know, I know. I never miss unless something major has gone down. But really I didn’t get anywhere near enough sleep the night before and when I tried to grab a nap my kiddo was incapable of letting me. Plus I didn’t have a sitter. And the other mom who brings her kids to write in (they play with mine super well), told me they weren’t coming. AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Does that qualify as major?
It did to me.
So I stayed home. I didn’t even write. I didn’t even write my bog post for Wednesday. I watched documentaries and painted. I needed that break though, let me tell you. Yesterday felt almost as long as the drive back from Park City, Utah, which I did in one day, all 850 odd miles of it, with my kiddo.
So onto the photo situation. I promised you a reveal this week and I will.
The problem is…..
Everyone seems to like one photo and I really like another. I posted the photos to facebook because I wasn’t getting enough meaningful feedback here. And I got a full slew of friends who swear this is the best photo ever.
I like it. I do. It needs some photo shopping, like the shadow and lines on my neck.
But personally, I feel pulled to this one.
Yes, it needs the shine fixed on my lip gloss. I’m thinking about maybe bringing it up from black and white to a tonal shot, not full color but playful. It could be interesting given how much of my hair is on display and is blue and green.
Sigh, what’s an author to do. Tell me, please?
I just read an amusing and insightful little number on Long Reads this morning. You can find the whole article here http://blog.longreads.com/2015/06/16/internet-cold-turkey/.
Let me sum it up for you though….
Man leaves the internet, his cell phone, and almost all human contact behind to spend a week in a shack, no running water, no power, in the Scottish highlands. He finds himself on the edge of madness before he manages to embrace himself as a person worth knowing and spending time with.
I loved it. But then again for the most part, I love time without people. It was my birthday last weekend and people keep asking what did you do. I smile and tell them my husband took my son to the pool for several hours both days. This confuses people. But for me 3 hours of time all alone….magic. Two days in a row? Miracle.
My favorite line from the article is this one, “or else, in moments when dystopian visions of us slowly morphing into robots feel horribly prescient, staring dumbly at a screen trying to remember whether I had any reason to look at it other than to bask for a moment in its warm, comforting glow.” I could relate to this. I find myself checking my wordpress stats page several times a day to see if anyone read me, liked me, or commented. It doubles if I’ve asked questions.
Tomorrow I will be posting 6 possible author photos for my book. You get to vote. So why not practice the art of opinion now and tell me if you’ve ever gone without internet or cell phone for a period of time and how you coped or reveled in the experience.
Today I drive 856 miles home through 4 states.
The good news for you is a new book review come tomorrow. The bad news for me is the week is almost up, week three, and I’ve only written 1000 words. Sigh. All done in one afternoon while watching two six year olds make up a whole world and catch bugs in the back yard.
But I’ll be home tomorrow. I can get back in the groove, get words into schrivner, make up for delightfully wasted time.
See you soon.
so I spent a good part of this weekend struggling to take author photos. Yes, that may sound ridiculous, and I guess maybe it is but it is also the reality of who I am. I do not like to be looked at. I do not like the way I look. I am most comfortable, when I am invisible physically, and can be just me.
The very act of taking an author photo defies all of the emotions I just attempted to explain. And because I am female there is an inherent suggestion that I should be beautiful. And I am not. And I am aware of that constantly. In fact when anyone tries to suggest I am attractive in any way, there is this huge rift in my time space continuum because my brain refuses the suggestion. It’s like those mystery spots where things roll up hill and you know it can’t really be defying the laws of physics so your brain struggles and you get dizzy? That’s kind of what happens to me when someone says I have beautiful eyes or whatever.
This whole thing has actually been a three step process. First pictures with me doing my own make up. Picture hearty laughter from the photographer. Then after she and her assistant had hit me with half the contents of Mac and again with something in the middle. Each time paring down the poses. Paring down the clothes that photograph well.
Each time forcing me to smile or not smile, suck it in, let it out, show some cleavage, cover it up, toes pointed, toes relaxed, shows on, shoes off, pretend, pretend, pretend…
I am exhausted.
Yesterday I drove 774 miles with my six year old. And I’m alive enough to blog about it.
Kiddo and I have been doing road trips for years though, so I thought I knew exactly how it was going to go. I thought I knew so well in fact, that I wrote a blog post about it Thursday night that I could tweak just a little and post up last night when I got to my destination. Except I was wrong. Thank god for growth.
I assumed kiddo would sleep in because I wanted to leave early. He did.
I wanted to leave at 7AM and jokingly suggested in my blog that we would leave at 723. Frighteningly enough we did.
Then I wrote copious amounts comparing traveling with a small child to water torture. Except, it wasn’t this time. I gave kiddo a DVD player, my kindle, his tablet, a bag of snacks and an ice cooler of food and drinks and he barely said a word for 700 miles. It was glorious. I listened to a fluffy Meg Cabot audio book ( I love her ) then dove into the Murder Club, an intriguing non fiction book about detectives from various agencies coming together to solve impossible cold cases. A formal review to follow in the next week or so.
I will back up briefly and say that Thursday night my husband was like “you need a good night sleep, tomorrow will be a long day.” I agreed it was a long drive, then he said “and you’re going to Missy’s, that means a long night of drinking.” I told him they had plans and that I was just going to get there, put kiddo to bed, yoga, shower and hit the hay myself but I still accepted his offer of massage.
Turns out he was right. They bailed their plans, invited mutual friends over, and we drank and played Phase 10 til one AM. ROFL
Update for the week: 647 words on my spy novel. (19 weeks and 39, 353 words to go) I am behind. boo. and I’m traveling for the next two weeks with the kiddo. I’ll have to find a way to make it up. Although once I leave Missy’s on Monday, I’ll have some time. Going to the in-laws. They just want to see the kiddo anyway. I’ll smile, nod, and tinker on my laptop for a week.
So tell me, do you try to write while traveling or just leave it? And if you do write while traveling, how do you squeeze it in?
This morning as I was doing home school with my kiddo we were reading this book a
bout Geography. I love this book and if I can get it on other subjects I will. (the tone is funny while still talking to kids like they have brains.) But I digress, I came across a section on big Hollywood movies that make major mistakes pertaining to Geography.
-Jurassic Park, when Nedry is meeting on the beach to discuss stealing the dino embryos, the local is listed as San Jose, Costa Rica. Except San Jose is 50 miles from the beach. Oops
-Armageddon, when they are celebrating the destruction of the meteorite all over the world, it is magically day in every local.
-Titanic, Jack tells Rose he used to fish in Lake Wissota in Wisconsin. Throw away line to give him some back story, right? Oops, Lake Wissata was created by a dam that was built in 1915, three years after the Titanic sunk. Too bad he didn’t use his time machine to go back and tell himself not to get on the Titanic, eh?
-Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indy’s plane flies Southwest out of Shanghai passing over the Great Wall of China, which is actually hundreds of miles North of Shanghai. Cool airplane trick. I want one.
-The Sound of Music, the Von Trapp family climbs over the Alps from Salzberg and across the border into Switzerland. Yeah, they are safe. But wait, if you cross the Alps from Salzberg the border you cross is actually into Nazi Germany. Oops, not safe.
This right here is why I research. Because someone always cares. These are quick mistakes that could have been avoided with a 30 second google search. I always take the 30 seconds, even when that means 3 years to write one stinkin’ spy novel. It will be correct when I finally finish it.
And I used these example because I liked these movies. I still do.
Quick reminder; if you are in the area, tonight at 7PM at Boxleys in North Bend is the Bard and Starlett hour. 
It was one of those weekends full of reminders that I am indeed an adult and I almost behave like one naturally.
Example A) I got food poisoning or maybe the stomach flu Friday, spent Friday night sick as a dog. When my husband suggested he would go shopping for birthday presents for my son’s favorite playmates (seven year old twin girls), I said yes and got back in bed. Where I stayed all day long. All day.
Example B) The community pool opened this weekend. Except here in the Pacific Northwest the temperature didn’t get above 60 this weekend. My husband took my son who couldn’t wait to go swimming while I gave the whole thing a pass. Just because the body of water is open doesn’t mean it has to be swam in.
Now these sound like little things, and maybe they are, but to a girl who once skinny dipped in San Francisco Bay in January just because she could, these are big growth moments. LOL.
On the writing front, it is half way through my first week and I have written zero words on my spy novel. But I think I have both an idea and access to documents for the research end for my Nano this year. It will be a murder mystery. And yes it is in the foam bowling pin range. Not sure what I’m talking about. Read up here. Plot Stucture
T.A. Henry 