Book Review: The Lost Track of Time

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 1 Comment

I grabbed The Lost Track of Time by Paige Britt at one the scholastic warehouse sales I take the kiddo to twice a year.  It looked like something right up my alley, girl literally falls into her schedule to find time to write. smiles. The last warehouse sale I was at, my friend K brought it up to me and said, this so looks like something you’d like. I had to laugh and tell her I’d already bought it at the last sale.

Paige does an interesting job of intertwining pun and play on word lines with great story telling. I know I complained previous about too much play on words but this is not overdone at all. It’s funny. I felt so much for the main character, Penelope, who’s parents literally schedule every moment of her day. And she tries to talk to them about the things she wants. But they are incapable of hearing her. That part made me sad.

But then she falls into a schedule page that by some inexplainable mistake, was left blank, and Penelope runs off with the page while her mom is busy trying to figure out how it happened and how to fill the time. Because you can’t just do NOTHING. An amazing adventure ensues. Read it for yourself. But I do want to share a few lines that struck me so I had to read them two or three times.

Many had time to spare and would share it with anyone who asked. “There’s no present like time,” they’d say and give away minutes, hours, even days to those in need. (65)

Make sure you read that right. It doesn’t say there’s no time like the present, which is of course what my brain read the first time through. “There’s no present like time.”

“All we know is how you are, and how you are is exactly how you’re meant to be.” (102)

Pfffft. Mind Blown. This is me. As I should be. Makes me want to stop trying so hard to be a good person. It just go with my gut.

“The only time you can spend is the time you have right now. And the time you have right now is all the time in the world.” (235-236)

All the time in the world….

℘℘℘℘ – Four Pages. This one was hard to rate because it impacted me, but at times it dragged. LOL. So I compromised on a 4 rating.

Saturday Surprise

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 4 Comments

This morning the kiddo and I cleaned the hamster cage. I try to get him to do it every week and if he won’t then inevitably at a week and half (the max the pet store suggested) I clean it myself. But today kiddo was all on board. Let’s get it done mom so we can go to the BBQ.

Awesome!

So we have a process. I always wash the ball part first so the hamster can run around the house in his nice clean ball while we wash the rest of the cage and re-bed it.

Generally taking the ball off and moving the cage to the laundry room wakes up Lego, the hamster, but not today. So I clean the ball and kiddo dries it and then he goes looking for the hamster to put him in. Big Surprise. Any guesses?

Nope, the hamster wasn’t dead.

The hamster pulled a Houdini. Somehow he escaped his locked cage. He was there last night. This morning he was gone.

huh….

Fiendish Friday: BSD

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 6 Comments

Back in my previous life, ie, before the kiddo, I worked in the tech world. When I was first starting out in said world I started at the bottom of the food chain, in desktop support. What that meant was you whined and I came to your desk and fixed it. It was a good gig. 500 end users, a couple of desktop people,  network guy, and a server guy. We all did our jobs and some of us went drinking afterwards but I won’t be sharing those stories tonight. Nope this is about trauma.

So the funnest call was always the one that started with panic. “I came back from” insert lunch, meeting, getting coffee, etc “and my screen is blue, totally blue. What do I do?”

“You have everything saved to your server directory right?”

“ummmmm, no….” ensuing tears.

Cue me hitting the mute button before laughing uproariously. Blue Screen of Death and you are screwed.

Yesterday I had my own personal version of the blue screen of death. Not on my PC, oh no. Myself. Picture me hysterically crying in my kitchen while I try to explain to the hubs that all the crap currently weighing on me, combined with the kiddo thinking he was going for gold in arguing with mom that day, and a 19 year old sorority girl laughing at me because I expected her to do what she said she would do (no joke) had broken me. I was BSD.

You know it’s bad when a friend shows up before her party and then suggests maybe you should stay home because you look so tore.

Broken. Just crying all evening off and on.

I must get off the pool board. If I could just get free of that I would have both the time (20 plus hours a week back) and the energy (hello, 20 hours a week) to deal with everything else.

But I made a commitment and I hate shirking responsibility.

What say you oh loyal readers? Shirk or BSD?

Wednesday (No) Writing Update

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 4 Comments

ha.

I’m not at cafe.

I’m not writing.

I’m not processing my beta edits.

I’m not painting my house.

I’m not writing curriculum for the school year which starts in 6 weeks.

I’m not yoga every day.

I’m barely even showering regularly.

Although perhaps taken together some of these things aren’t so bad. LOL

It appears I have found my sense of humor again, maybe. I can’t be depressed if I’m still laughing at myself right?

Tell me a joke, make me laugh.

 

Random Tuesday Post: Modern Publishing

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 2 Comments

He’s brilliant as always. And once again telling me things I didn’t quite realize.

Scammers used to operate at the edges of the publishing business, but have wormed their way into its heart. And the entire industry is in denial. An unintentionally revealing aspect of the tiresome Amazon-Hachette dispute was a series of statements from an organization purporting to advocate for authors’ rights. One of the heinous crimes Amazon […]

via This Is The Modern Publishing Business — David Gaughran

Book Review: Patient Zero

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 3 Comments

Fellow blogger and book enthusiast Lilyn over at SciFi and Scary reviewed Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry a bit back and she made it sound like something I might like. That’s pretty hard to do because I’m not a huge fan of zombie stuff. Just see my posts about checking the bushes for zombies when I have to walk the dog in the dark. And to top it off the library only had it in this weird adobe editions thing, which meant I had to read the book on the big family computer. The one my hubs uses to game on and my son games and homeschools on. But by Chapter 5 I was wondering how I could rearrange my day to keep reading. I couldn’t of course and so every time I would come into the kitchen to read and find someone on the computer I would growl, not unlike a zombie. LOL

Patient Zero is the first in the Joe Ledger series. Terrorists have come up with a new way to attack America, zombies. The book’s time line is compressed, just a week. With multiple spectacular action sequences. I kept finding myself slightly dizzy and my chest super tight and then realized I was literally holding my breathe while I was reading. I’m guessing some people would complain that the action was gratuitous and the detective work too detailed to be interesting, but I was enthralled. This is pure adventure. Time to save the world people.

Part of me is desperate to get the next one and part of me is so wrung out from the adrenalin ride that I need a vacation. LOL. I’ve decided on a compromise, I ordered the physical copy of Code Zero, the next Joe Ledger from the library. That will take at least a week. Maybe in the mean time, I can finish the four other books I’m reading right now. LOL

℘℘℘℘℘ – Five Pages. I would have read it in one sitting if I could have. Already ordered the next book in the series. If you like your blood pumping, this book is amazing.

Fiendish Friday: People Suck

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 4 Comments

All the things that have happened lately have just deflated my Pollyanna bubble. Call me ridiculous or naive but I honestly believed people did the best they could. That people were, for the most part, good and decent. But my Pollyanna glasses have been shattered. They weren’t quite rose colored, I wasn’t that full of the faith of mankind, but they had a faint pink tint until lately.

Yes, I know bad things happen all the time on a global scale. But I guess I always felt like you and me, in our day to day life, we weren’t out to get anyone. We – I was trying to make my immediate world a good place, just a little at a time.

But in the last few months, I see so much hypocrisy. People ignoring whatever doesn’t align with their world view. Attacking what they don’t understand. Pointing fingers and throwing barbs when they could just accept their own portion of responsibility in a situation. Selfishness taken to the extreme. And I feel like…people just suck. Grasping for themselves. Cheering for their side as though it isn’t real humans who are losing, sometimes their lives. Lying, Stealing, throwing temper tantrums when they don’t get their own way.

What happened to humanity? Please just tell me one beautiful, heart warming thing you have witnessed in the last, I don’t care how long….

 

Book Review: The Readaholics and the Poirot Puzzle

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My TBR shelf is over flowing and I should really be reading some non fiction stuff to put together a curriculum for my geography cum history/literature class this fall and yet while my book is out for beta I couldn’t help but binge on fun reading. Like The Readaholics and the Poirot Puzzle by Laura DiSilverio. Readaholics? Oh yeah. Agatha Christie reference? double check check.

The Poirot reference isn’t the only thing Christiesque about the book. It went down smooth, like creme caramel sliding off the spoon, tantalizing your tongue before landing lightly on your belly. Well this book slid gently off the page, tantalizing my eyes before landing lightly on my brain and dissipating.

Amy Faye, the main character, has her hands full, with a book club that reads only mysteries (Can I join?) and then watches the movie made of them. Her own event planning business. A hot new love interest. And her brother’s new brew pub – she’s handling the opening. Nothing like a murder to mar an event.

I read this in one day, partly thanks to the hubs who took the kiddo to the pool for 3 hours, hello found reading time. But I might have anyway since when options arose, I opted to keep my nose in this creme caramel, each time, til it was done. And yes, I scraped the bottom of the bowl. Then went online to order the first book in the series. LOL

℘℘℘℘℘ – Five Pages for the sheer joy of this total fluff.

PS. Just finished the first one, Readaholics and the Falcon Fiasco, also fabulous.

Saturday Study: King on adverbs

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 9 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve dove back into the long list of quotes I distilled from Stephen King’ On Writing. And given the way my life has been going I thought I could use a reminder of just how complicated even the simplest of subjects can be. It’s never black and white. And on that note…

Everyone and their brother can quote King “the road to hell is paved with adverbs.” It’s practically tattooed on every author’s tongue so it can slip off in casual conversation. LOL

So what is an adverb? Google says an adverb is a word or phrase that modifies or qualifies an adjective, verb, or other adverb or a word group, expressing a relation of place, time, circumstance, manner, cause, degree, etc.

That’s doesn’t sound so bad to me and certainly not an appropriate paving material for a road, whatever the destination. But King insists “While to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.” (128)

So he’s against complicated dialogue tags. Ok, I can see that. Makes total sense.

But King admits he uses adverbs himself.

When I do it, it’s usually for the same reason any writer does it: because I am afraid the reader won’t understand me if I don’t. I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. (126)

Ahh. So if I am concerned the reader might not understand me, I should look for a way to rewrite that doesn’t use an adverb? But here’s where it starts to get complicated.

Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. Good writing is also about making good choices when it comes to picking the tools you plan to work with. (128)

Could I let go of the fear that someone might criticize my adverb use? If good writing is letting go of fear and affectation, then I – you should write what feels appropriate to the novel you are creating. The best arguement for writing what works for you is this…

Even at it’s best writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God’s name would you want to make things worse by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you really wanted to use? (118)

Write what works, road to hell be damned.

What do you think about adverbs?

 

Fiendish Friday: Shhhh

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 9 Comments

I was catching up on my blog reading this morning when I read a post about why someone writes. She ended her post by asking why I write. So not something I wanted to think about. Here’s the dirty little secret I’ve been wrestling with but I haven’t shared with anyone…Ever since I published that desperate driving desire to write and publish has been satiated.

I’m not sure why I write anymore. That thrill of creation occurs less and less. Mostly when I sit down to create a new work I just feel like it’s a job. It’s WORK.

I used to sit down at my laptop and work to get myself into the right space and then when the words started to flow it was amazing. This incredible sensation, of yes, this is it.

It rarely happens anymore. Mostly I slog it out and it sounds like crap to me after I’m done. I can tell you the exact spot in my spy novel, where it becomes crap. The stuff I wrote four years ago, is good. I can still see that. But the new stuff, the stuff I wrote this year to finish it. Crap. Pure crap.

I’ve lost that loving feeling. Now it’s gone, gone, gone, whoa o o o.

Maybe I need a bunch of guys in uniform to sing to me in a bar….