Well, fooey…

September 14, 2012August 22, 20142 Comments

Oil Painting Workspace (Photo credit: nimbu)

I know I promised an exciting (Ha! :)) photo essay on repainting Tomcat’s room for today’s Photo Friday post, but the thing is, well…we’re not done. Oh, I’ve got a few before pictures, and we’ve got two coats of primer on the ceiling, plus a coat of paint and three coats of paint on the walls and two coats of paint on the radiator (I won’t be sorry to see that thing go as soon as we can afford to redo our heating and lack of cooling system). But the plastic is still on the bed and the floor, the tape is still on the light fixtures and the woodwork, and every night this week, we’ve looked at that wallpaper border and sighed with exhaustion. Also loathing. Maybe even a few other things.

So with no pretty, pretty after pictures to show off, I’m going to wait on that post-bedroom-remodeling post I had planned. Seymour wants to get the border put up Sunday, so maybe one day next week, I’ll get it done. That sounds like a nice, reasonably distant time.

Meanwhile, today is the day for the entries to fly in the agent pitch contest for GUTGAA (short for Gearing Up To Get An Agent). My entry didn’t make it into the morning pitch session, which literally filled up in seconds. Amazingly, we didn’t break Gmail. 🙂 The afternoon session starts in mere minutes. I had my finger hovering over the send button on my email this morning and my eye on the clock; I hit send as soon the clock hit 11:00 a.m. (well, 10:00 a.m. here), but I was just a bit too slow. Hopefully the afternoon session won’t be quite as crazy as the morning. There are 200 available slots; 100 remain as of this moment.

Okay, I just hit send. Let the waiting begin.

THIS JUST IN: I MADE THE CUT!!!

Pitching like crazy!

September 13, 20123 Comments

If you follow me on Twitter, then chances are you’ll have seen me tweeting like mad today about Vegin, Anná, and the goings-on in Lokana. If you follow me here, then chances are you know that brevity is not my strong suit, which means that a pitch session on Twitter is guaranteed to make my brain explode. I have two reasonably decent short pitches that fit within Twitter limits and still leave room for hashtags. Coming up with others, though, has given me one heck of a headache.

Agents a-plenty lurked about the hashtag #PitMad today, scoping out all the pitches you could handle. Tweets were flying fast and furious and without TweetDeck, I’m afraid I’d have been lost. Heck, even with it, I was afraid I’d be lost! TweetDeck’s lovely columns feature kept me scrolling along in real time, so there was slightly less confusion. I’ll take any reduction in confusion I can get these days. Anyway, so with agents lurking, authors were pitching their books in 140 characters or less and boy, was it crazy! Here are some of the different ways I came up with to pitch The Lokana Chronicles:

One man longs to transform his kingdom…

Writers and SQUIRREL!

September 12, 20128 Comments

Artsy types have the attention span of a fruit bat on crack – we love chasing shiny objects. Don’t believe me? Just turn on a pen light and dance it across a wall at a Starbucks. Guarantee you will lure at least two writers and a musician. –Kristen Lamb

Mythbusting – Three Lies That Could Sabotage Your Writing Success (warriorwriters.wordpress.com)

Caffeine – Addicted or no?

September 11, 201210 Comments

I don’t have a problem with caffeine. I have a problem WITHOUT caffeine.

Remember

September 11, 2012September 11, 20122 Comments

The sky is a beautiful blue today. Here and there I can see a wisp of cloud stretched out like gauze. The sun is shining, there is a bit of a breeze, and the humidity is down, keeping the 90° temperatures bearable and keeping my kids in school all day.

My kids, now there’s a thought. Today is so much like another September Tuesday that it’s really quite eerie, only I was the kid then. I was the one getting ready to head off to school that Tuesday morning, under skies that were just as blue, with clouds that were just as gauzy and sun that shone just as brightly.

That Tuesday was eleven years ago today.

I repeat…

September 10, 201210 Comments

Dear God, I think I’m going to die. I need a good long soak in a nice hot bath. And a nap. It should last a week or two. And perhaps a full-body massage. That ought to put me on the mend.

That is all. 😀

Painting a bedroom, or Dear God, I think I’m going to die

September 9, 20122 Comments

I’ve spent all weekend prepping and painting Tomcat’s bedroom. We’ve lived here three years now and we’ve painted Tadpole’s room and Cricket and Thumper’s room (they share), but we hadn’t done Tomcat’s. We haven’t painted our room yet, either, but it’s gonna wait a while longer yet. Anyway, his room is gonna rock when it’s done. Meanwhile, I forgot how much painting sucked. We ran out of paint, so while we’re waiting for the first coat to dry, Seymour took Tomcat and Tadpole to town to buy supplies and I put Cricket and Thumper down for naps. Time to relax!

P.S. Stay tuned – Friday’s photo post will feature the before and after pictures. 🙂

Colors You Shouldn’t Paint Bedroom (huffingtonpost.com)
Paint Outside the Box: 10 Unconventional Ways to Paint Your Rooms (apartmenttherapy.com)

It’s another Photo Friday!

September 7, 2012August 22, 20146 Comments

Here we are, at the end of another week, and I must say I’m glad of it. I’m not looking forward to spending the weekend painting, but that’s another story. Anyway, on to the photo of the day!

Photo by Kay Kauffman

Today’s photo features Tomcat, my oldest son. Clearly this is not a recent photo, as my darling baby boy will be nine on Wednesday. Nine! How the heck did that happen? Oh, right. I blinked. I remember now. He was just over two and a half when I snapped this picture, slightly older than Cricket is now. He looks so little! And now he’s so big! I can’t believe I have a third grader on my hands!

Quick! Get me a brick! Get me some rope! Get me a drink!

Daddy

September 6, 2012September 6, 20126 Comments

Night after night he sat there, hunched over his desk with a paperback in hand. He angled his desk lamp over the page so that the incandescent bulb glowed mere inches away from his head. I can’t count the number of hours I saw him sit like that, devouring page after chapter after book. He read all kinds of books: westerns and poetry and biographies and anything else he could get his hands on.

But Louis L’Amour was his favorite. If he didn’t read every book that man wrote, he sure came close. He would read the books and when he was done, round them up and donate them to the library. Other times, depending on the author, he would give them to me. Our home was always stuffed to the gills with books and I am proud to say that such is still the case – I have far more books than places to put them (which only means that I need more shelf space).

Daddy instilled in me a love of books that I hope to instill in my own children, that I am trying to instill in my own children. I love to see Cricket’s face light up when he sees a new book; I love to discuss the Goosebumps series with Tomcat and tell him which ones I enjoyed when I was younger and hear which ones he likes. I love watching Seymour install beautiful custom bookshelves in every nook and cranny our old house has to offer and believe me, there are plenty.

But of the many wonderful memories related to books that spill forth from my childhood, the one that will stick with me the longest is the one of my father in his squeaky desk chair, his jacket sleeves shoved up his forearms and his hair mussed up because he hadn’t combed it yet that day, hunched over his desk devouring another book with a beer and a cigarette nearby.