Category: Poetry

Camera skills

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IMG_20140301_104334Apparently, I’m not too shabby with a camera.  I’ve been an amateur photographer for a good decade and a half now (a little over that, actually), ever since I got my first camera for Christmas, and it’s something I love.  Most of the pictures that accompany my poems are ones that I’ve taken (unless otherwise noted).  It’s so much fun; I can’t imagine not having a camera to play around with.  And, while I do miss my old film cameras, it’s nice that with my DSLR, I can take as many pictures as I want without having to worry about paying to have bad pictures developed.  Of course, this has also made me a little more careless, I think, in my composition, but such is life.

But I digress.  When I post something new here, I usually head over to Facebook and share the link in a couple of groups I’m in.  Last week, my post “Lonesome Call” gathered a bit of attention there, as someone found my photo of a lone tree in a field near my hometown particularly inspiring.  She crafted a whole poem around the image, which I was quite flattered to read.  Apparently it’s been making its way around the web via Facebook, from what I can tell.  If you’d like to take a look for yourself, you can find it here.

If you decide to check it out, I hope you’ll enjoy. 🙂

(c) 2014.  All rights reserved.

Time flies

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My little Tomcat at the tender age of fourPhoto by Kay Kauffman

My little Tomcat at the tender age of four
Photo by Kay Kauffman

My, how time flies!  Without my even realizing it, this little blog o’ mine has turned five years old.  That happened somewhere around the tail end of last month and I forgot all about writing my planned retrospective about my time in the blogging world.

Five years.  My, how the years have flown!  I started blogging about six months after my divorce was finalized.  I wanted to write passionate political spiels of great depth and insight; I wanted to pen fantastic short fiction that was sure to catch the eye of someone important, that elusive one right person who could make all my lifelong literary dreams come true; I wanted to create a wildly successful blog that would spawn book deals and syndicated columns and who knows what else.

In short, I had high hopes.  I was young, bright-eyed yet jaded.   Possibly I had delusions of grandeur.

The writer speaks

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Friday morning, I visited the third graders at Reinbeck Elementary School.  The kids were all lovely and quite attentive while I prattled on about poetry and writing, punctuated by the occasional attempt at humor.  (My suspicions that I’m not funny were confirmed – not one kid cracked a single smile.)

Mrs. Fleshner introduced me by saying how surprised she was to discover an author in their midst. I imagine it was something of a surprise; I’ve known her a couple years now, as Tadpole had her for third grade last year and nothing was ever said of my writing then.  But at conferences this year, we happened to get on the subject of books and how we just don’t have the time to read as much or as often as we would like.  I said that my problem was that I wanted to both read books and write them, but I didn’t have the time to do both, and that was how we ended up discussing my writing.  She invited me to speak to the class, and I agreed, despite my intense dislike of public speaking.

I surprised her again when I arrived a bit early, laden with visual aids.

*squee*

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The e-book version of Tuesday Daydreams is now available for Kindle!  You can find it here or by searching for it in the Kindle store.  Right now this is as far as I’ll go with the e-book version, but maybe next weekend when I will hopefully have more peace and quiet, I can get it formatted for other e-readers as well.  Gretchen, any pointers would be much appreciated!  Oh, yeah – I still have to read the Smashwords Style Guide I downloaded.  That would probably help. 🙂

Between my excitement over having finally released a title and my fatigue from driving all over two counties today and my frustration with my oldest son, I’m a bit all over the place at the moment.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I see an adult beverage and a scotcheroo with my name on them.  Happy weekend!

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

Authors to Watch and more

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Ah, authors to watch.  There must be a jillion of them.  I, however, am referring to ten certain authors who were featured yesterday in an interview by Tricia Drammeh.  She asked the question, “Why do you write fantasy?” and received some great answers from some great authors, including yours truly (although I make no claims as to my greatness).  Check it out!  Each interviewee provided links to a variety of sites at which you can check out their work and/or learn more about them.

In other news, rumor has it that the release of Promises, the second Timeless Series novel, will be delayed.  Fans of Lisa Wiedmeier’s fantasy series will now have to wait till the end of May to continue following Cheyenne’s adventures.

I’ve almost finished the Kindle version of Tuesday Daydreams.  Learning the formatting stuff was easy enough for the most part, but I still have a couple of glitches to work out here and there.  I hope to have the Kindle version available for purchase by the end of the week (by which I mean the end of the calendar week, not tomorrow).  I had Chinese for lunch today and ate my fortune cookie on the way back to work.  I had to chuckle as I read my fortune:Channel your energy into something positive.  I’d say all this work on my writing is definitely something positive. 🙂

Last but not least, the rain has come at long last and everything is turning a lovely shade of green.  I adore spring. ♥

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

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Tuesday Daydreams is now on Amazon!

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That’s right, folks, you now have two places to procure my dreamy poetry anthology, Tuesday Daydreams.  It’s available at CreateSpace and now it’s available at Amazon as well!  I’m working on formatting it for e-book publication as we speak and further updates will be made when, you know, I have something new to report. 🙂

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

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It’s here! It’s finally here!

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Aaand…everything checked out with proof copy number two!  Tuesday Daydreams is now available for purchase.  Head on over to CreateSpace today (or just click on the picture to the left) to pick up your copy.  It will also be available on Amazon as soon as they update whatever it is they need to update.  In the meantime, you can read more about it here!

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.