Word Crimes

This video from Weird Al Yankovic deserves its own post, so here you go:

Impractical Halloween Costume

Pippin wanted to go as a Bobcat for Halloween

I told him it wouldn't be practical for trick-or-treating.

He then tricked me with a treat: a dead bird in the house at 5:30 am this morning. Which I took outside, and he promptly brought right back in. Locked the cat flap, but never did get back to sleep!

Can I Get Your Opinion?

So part of the LA SCBWI conference next weekend is the Hippie Hop, a dance and social. I have two possible outfits that I can't decide on. Will you help? And note that the flower and peace symbol were added in Photoshop, but I have face and body paints for the real thing the night of.

OR

I think one is more striking, but the other would be easier to dance in.

Power to the people, and please vote in the comments!

Letting My Inner Teen Out to Play

My two nieces (12 and 13) came to visit from Texas a few weeks ago, and it didn't take long for my husband to discover he was actually sharing the house with three teenaged girls. Yep, scratch my responsible, middle-aged veneer and you'll find a giggly, squee-ly teen.

We went to see Brave, went horseback riding, and to the Folsom City Zoo Sanctuary. All things I can (and do) without them, but so much more fun with someone who is as enthusiastic about those kinds of things as I am. We were even going to chalk our hair one evening since their mom won't let them dye it (note: I was 14 the first time I dyed mine) but it seemed like they needed some downtime with their Kindles too.

That brings us to what we talked about most of all--books! They each have a Kindle Fire, but apparently their dad has a rule that they can only get free books for it. And there are a lot of free books that are great, but unfortunately also a lot of substandard self pubs out there too. (notice I'm not knocking all self-pubbed books--just those titles that make the entire industry look bad)

So we bemoaned all the books I've purchased that don't have lending enabled. I have over 100 items on my Kindle, and I was only able to find 7 YA titles that had lending enabled. I know it's up to each individual publisher to decide that, but wow--that's a very small percentage.

As a consolation prize, I let them go through the YA books I bought to give as presents this Christmas and pick a few out to read now. They happily spent a few hours drowning in a pile of books. That's what aunties are for, right?

I would have liked to have spent more time with them, but was also pretty exhausted after just 3 days of them. How do you parents do this all the time? Granted, we went from 0 to teenager, but still . . .

The reason we only took them for a long weekend (plus joined them and my mom for a few evenings) was because I'm doing a big push on my WIP before the LA conference, and I'm not a super-fast writer. So that means more butt-in-chair. My one niece kept trying to coax me into camping with them, but when I said, "If I don't write the book, how will you ever get to read it?" she nodded in agreement.

My mom was more aggravating about it (she's mostly stopped bringing up ideas for jobs for me) and kept saying, "Can't you just not write for the week they're here?" What annoyed me is that she would not have said to my brother or my husband, "Can't you just not go into work for a week?" She understands that they have to do some planning and juggling of their work schedules to take time off, and even then may not be able to do it, but thinks that doesn't apply to my writing. Aargh!

Okay, apparently my inner teen can still get off a good "my mom just doesn't understand me!" rant, haha!

RTW: In the Moment

Road Trip Wednesday is a "Blog Carnival," where YA Highway's contributors and followers post a weekly writing- or reading-related question and answer it on their blogs. You can hop from destination to destination through the YA Highway site and get everybody's unique take on the topic.

This week's topic: A long-awaited kiss, a surprise ending, a character's sudden decision… these are the moments that make us smile, gasp, and LOVE a book for the rest of our lives.
What is your favorite literary moment?

All the specific examples I could think of for this were too spoilery (the squiggly red underline said spoilery is not a word, but I flashed it my literary license), so I had to think in more general terms.

What came to mind is Christopher Moore's mastery of absurd humor that turns expectations on their head. I love all his books, but the one that best demonstrates it is A Dirty Job. The MC is Charlie, who lost his wife just after she gave birth to their child. As if that wasn't dark enough, Charlie has just been recruited as a Death, one of many reapers that hold onto souls until they move on. Only he doesn't know about his new role right away, and his grief over his wife is interrupted and complicated by all the weird things happening to him now.

My favorite scene is when Charlie goes over to a home to assess some clothing for his thrift shop. An elderly man takes Charlie into his late wife's closet, where in his own grief the old man says he wants to die. Charlie can absolutely sympathize--he still misses his wife, who "still occupied that place in his heart, and when he turned in the kitchen to say something to her and she wasn't there, it took his breath."

The old man is trying to speak through his own grief to tell Charlie about his wife, and finally gets out, "She was so phenomenally stupid."

They then have an exchange wherein it's revealed the old man's wife died of eating the silica gel packets (yes, the ones that say "do not eat" right on them) and the internal dialogue as Charlie processes this is hilarious. Even if I transcribed the entire scene here, it wouldn't have the same impact, so I guess you'll have to take my word for it or read the book yourself. I highly recommend it!

Don't forget to go to the comments on the YA Highway RTW post to see everyone else's answers!

Birds & Blooms Backyard Blunder Contest

Birds & Blooms was the first magazine to pay me for my work ten years ago, and now they have a contest that sounds like fun:

"Do you have a funny birding or gardening story to share from your backyard? We want to hear it! Send us your best "backyard blunder," and the winning story will receive $500.

To enter, email your true story (no more than 400 words) to contests(at)birdsandblooms.com. Please put "backyard blunder contest" in the subject line."

Complete rules are here, and $500 will buy a lot of flowers or bird seed! Good luck if you enter!

Christmas Bird Count!

Yes, I know today's the day after Christmas, but it's the day selected for the Folsom Christmas Bird Count so that's when we got out to take a tally of the bird species in our area. It starts very early in the morning, but I do not, so I'm going to join my husband a little later in the day.

He's much better at bird identification than I am, but I must admit I'm an excellent spotter. That should give you some clues about our personalities: he will take the time to stay in one spot and confidently identify a single bird. I spot a bird, and then I'm trotting off, "oh, there's another one! and look over here--skunk poop!"

So whatever your plans are for today, have a good one! And may they not involve too much skunk poop.

Winners, Winners, I'm Allergic to Chicken Dinners

Yes, I really am allergic to chicken, so you'll have to enjoy this cool chicken (the graphic address changed, so there's no dancing chicken, sorry) while I draw names (well, the numbers assigned in the order you commented) with random.org.

And the first winner is...



Kris Atkins, you wanted the Amazon gift certificate, so expect an email later today from me and Amazon!

and the second winner is . . .



Christina Mercer, you wanted a lovely Faces of Fat Kitty City Calendar, so let me know if you want me to mail it or deliver it!

And winner the third is . . .



Sophia Chang, you wanted the Amazon gift certificate, so expect an email later today from me and Amazon!


Thank you to everyone who entered, and all the followers that have stuck with me all this time! And if you didn't win but wanted a Faces of Fat Kitty City Calendar, you can still get one through Fat Kitty City.

(name gifs from 123glitter.com)

Top 5 Reasons for Me to Lose That Weight

I know I've had the best excuse for gaining weight, but over the last year I put on about 20 pounds. Then in the last few months, I put on another 10 to make it a nice round 30 pounds (and I do mean round, my waist is only a memory). So now that I'm on my way to getting better, I'm determined to try to lose some weight. Here are my top 5 reasons why, in no particular order:

1. I NOW SNORE LIKE A WARTHOG Prior to this, I might have let out a delicate little piglet snort in my sleep occasionally, but now it's at drunken sailor volume. My husband even said that the other night, he dreamt he was sleeping next to a wild animal and woke up to my snoring. Weight gain can definitely promote snoring and sleep apnea, so the warthog needs to migrate on outta here.

2. I'M TIRED OF PEOPLE ASKING ME, "WHEN ARE YOU DUE?" Yes, I know I look like the right age for my childbearing years, and the majority of the extra weight has settled in my abdomen. But it's to the point where I've started giving strangers a made-up answer ("I'm four months along") because it's easier than seeing their embarrassment when I give the real answer ("Not pregnant, just fat, but thanks for asking") So time for that pseudo baby weight to drop.

3. MORE CLEAVAGE=MORE CLEAVAGE I'm not complaining about going up a cup size in my boobs (and my husband hasn't shared any complaints either) but I draw the line at having a cup size in my back fat. Because I've refused to buy new bras, my back fat gets pushed into back cleavage that is showing way too much in sweater season. Time for the back cleavage to split.

4. IF YOU CAN'T BEAT 'EM, JOIN 'EM My mother has been back on Weight Watchers for about 3 months, which means she is obsessed with "points". Every phone call or in-person meeting is filled with a recitation of how many points each item she has put in her mouth is worth, and incredulous lists of how many points the things she chose to not put in her mouth would have been. Despite my gentle comments meant to discourage such behavior, like "Hey Ma, save it for your Weight Watchers meetings and people who care" or "Mom, a list of points does not a conversation make", she still does it. So why not jump on the WW bandwagon and let her do all the points tracking for me?

5. REALITY BITES Last week I started back to water aerobics, and I got the bright idea to step on the locker room scale. And that's when reality hit: it's not the horizontal stripes that make me look fat, it's not the baggy sweater I grabbed out of my husband's drawer that makes me look fat--IT'S THE EXTRA 30 POUNDS OF FAT THAT MAKES ME LOOK FAT.

So if you've decided to lose weight, what's your inspiration?

Geek Delight

For my husband's birthday, I ordered a custom cake of Bag End, Bilbo Baggins's house in the Hobbit and other Lord of the Rings books. It ended up looking pretty cute, but I wanted to add a little more geekitude, so I went online and found some LOTR paper dolls.

Printed out Bilbo Baggins and Frodo Baggins (you can tell which one is Frodo by his determined expression and the tiny ring on a chain around his neck), along with Gandalf. While I was cutting out Tom Bombadil, I kept thinking that it looked like someone, and then I realized he kind of looks like Tom Green with a crazy beard.


















Anyway, here's how they look with the cake:





Tom Bombadil is one of my favorite characters from the book, but in that first photo he looks like some kind of lurking hobbitophile. Not really what I was going for, but good for a laugh nonetheless!


Also wanted to note that I'll be taking a break from blogging and other interwebz fun starting August 3rd. I'll set a few posts to go up automatically on the next two Mondays (look for another gluten free recipe, No-fuss Chocolate Cake, on Aug 15), but otherwise I'll reconnect about mid-August.

Reruns/Greatest Hits

I'm deep in Revisionland once again, so I thought I'd take a page from television series: Put up previously-viewed content and call it an "encore presentation"!

So, from my "Greatest Hits" file, here is a post that first appeared on August 30, 2010. Enjoy!

Surreal things happened this weekend; some made me laugh, and some made me cringe.

First up was the Stephen King Special ice cream truck that came through our neighborhood. The fact that an ice cream truck found our street was pretty amazing (he was already doing better than 90% of our visitors, who get lost trying to find us), but the music on this thing was ultra creepy. The new music system is not an improvement over the ol' Pop Goes the Weasel.

This ice cream truck had a recording that featured a calliope (the deceptively cheerful carnie instrument) and the voices of children singing something about "come out before I melt away." I kid you not, it was like a chorus of trapped souls. I don't know if Stephen King has featured a sinister ice cream truck in any of his stories, but this had shades of "It" that made me afraid to make eye contact with the driver.

The second thing was seeing a vanity plate that said AC230--you guessed it, on a Mercedes C230. It cracked me up to imagine this guy's thinking process, "Hmmm, I want to pay an extra $50 for a vanity plate, but I don't want it to be too obnoxiously ostenatious." I guess ASEDAN was already taken.

And lastly, apparently there is a (flabby) arms race going on with chain restaurants, wherein the novelty fried foods are escalating. Cheese seems to figure prominently in all of them, which makes me ever so grateful that I can't have dairy, thereby removing the temptation to consume my entire day's worth of calories (and week's worth of sodium and fat) in one sitting.

RTW--Sweet Cadaver Lips

Monday was a blogging holiday, wasn't it? Yeah, I didn't post because we were out of town and didn't have time to set up an automatic post before we left. But today is Road Trip Wednesday!

Road Trip Wednesday is a "Blog Carnival," where YA Highway's contributors and followers post a weekly writing- or reading-related question and answer it on their blogs. You can hop from destination to destination and get everybody's unique take on the topic.

This week's topic: What is the strangest/weirdest thing you've ever researched?

So this is where the title of my post comes into play. And, no,it's not a zombie reference! I once saw an item in the newspaper on organ and tissue donors,and it listed all the ways that your body and parts are used when you donate it.

In addition to the well-known organ donations and medical school donations, they mentioned that lip augmentation can use tissue from cadavers. They don't actually transplant the lips; they instead insert or inject skin cells harvested from cadavers to give lips that puffy look.

I found this to be just horrifying enough to be fascinating, and knew it required further research. Thank goodness for the relative anonymity of the internet, where I could search for "cadaver lips" and "cadaver cosmetic surgery" and "corpsey lips" (okay, that last one was a search for the lyrics of "Lady Margaret") without getting strange looks. Though I'm not altogether sure that I'm not on some sort of watch list.

Today, while typing this post, I tried to find the links I'd seen before, but instead came across this:



Sigh. Another book for my reading list.

What about you? What's the weirdest thing you've researched in the name of writing? Don't forget to go to YA Highway and check out everyone's answers (you'll find them in the comments).

FIDO: ever faithful

Zombies seem to be everywhere these days, so my husband rolled his eyes when I put in the disc for FIDO, another zombie movie. But we both ended up liking this one. Zombies give me the heebie-jeebies, but I can tolerate them better with a dose of humor.

FIDO delivers on the wry humor (I almost said "tongue-in-cheek" but that takes on a different tone when you're talking zombies)--like Pleasantville meets Shaun of the Dead (another must-see that I've blogged about), which sounds like an odd mix but actually works. I was surprised when I looked back and saw that it got an R rating for "zombie related violence." I've seen gorier movies with a PG-13 rating.

Here's the trailer:

Are You Ready to be Schooled?

Pitch University launches their first "Pitch U Pitchfest Week," wherein agent Christine Wittohn of BookCents Literary Agency will consider your pitches. If a video pitch intimidates you, they've added options for audio and written submissions to ease you into the process.

There are lots of details to get straight, so be sure to read the rules carefully. I recorded a pitch last week that I liked, and after re-reading their rules I discovered that I'd left out the important "completed" tag. So I tackled it again, and I thought I'd post the result today, in case anyone sees some glaring errors I need to fix by Sunday.



And as a bonus, some advice to prospective pitchers on word choice: beware dangerous word combinations like "sets a ship," or you could end up with a blooper like this:


Yes, I said "Olivia Herald sets a shit" before I cracked up. Mom would be so proud.

If you'd like to read the text of the pitch, it's the same one that's on my Novels page above.

A Neurotic's New Year's Eve

Having previously offered a glimpse into how my mind works/dreams, I thought I'd offer up what keeps me awake at night. You know, like on New Year's Eve when I got woken at midnight by neighborhood revelers (after not even attempting to stay up past our Long-Married Couple's Customary Bedtime) and then couldn't get back to sleep right away.

Here is what I thought about:

Remember that episode of "Friends" where you have a list of 10 celebrities that you can sleep with if given the opportunity, without it being cheating on your partner? So what if I ever did get the opportunity to sleep with Johnny Depp, Hugh Jackman, or Vampire Bill Compton (uh huh, fictional characters totally count) and they're in a relationship?

What if I'm not on their list? Would it be considered stalking behavior or charming behavior if I sent them a tweet right now that says, "I will rock your world, or at least skew it slightly. Add me to your list RIGHT NOW." I'm kind of afraid I'd end up on some kind of banned list instead.

And then I did get back to sleep, only to be woken later by a slithering sensation across my feet--exactly like a giant centipede would feel if it was step-step-stepping across them. I sat bolt upright in bed, to see my bleary-eyed cat stretched full length (he is approx. 3 ft. long in that position) across the foot of the bed, with his front paws over my feet.

Whew, it's just the cat. I can lay back down and go to sleep. But then it occurred to me, what if it really was a giant centipede and the cat's paws were over my feet because he'd sleepily batted at its retreating pincers? And what if the centipede is just waiting for me to drop my guard so it can lay eggs in my belly button?

I tell you, a writer's imagination is truly a blessing and a curse.

My Brain Hurts

Doesn't that look just like a lovely rosy cabbage? I should preface the following link with warnings that:

1. I have been spending much of my free time on revisions of my novel, which means I've been hanging out in the spirit world, and with ghosties .

2. In between, I've been reading/and or listening to The Forest of Hands and Teeth, The Dead-Tossed Waves, and the Graveyard Book.

So that will hopefully explain why I haven't been blogging lately, and why I found these so very amusing.

How My Mind Works (or Doesn't Work, You Be the Judge)

I had a conversation last week with some friends about emergency food stores, and at the time I realized that I might need to pay special attention to having staples on hand since my food allergies wouldn't let me just go loot some Doritos at the end of days.

Didn't think anything more of it, until I had a dream last night. A dream where the zombies were coming (old-school slow, shuffling zombies) and we were going to have to pack up the car and hightail it to the desert or some other unpopulated place. So I'm running around searching the cupboards, and a whole army of the living dead is coming up the street. At one point, there is an old man trying to chomp my arm through my sweater, and I'm yelling to my husband, "All we have is applesauce! And garbanzo beans!"

Horrifying! Especially because I hate garbanzos--applesauce is all right though. And zombies are bad, of course.

Revision Swamp

Deep in the revision swamp since we've been back from our trip, so I haven't been posting as often. Or trolling my blogger friends' sites, sorry. But the pumpkins ripening in the garden made me feel Halloween-ish and I thought I'd inflict the following videos on you:
P.S. I should warn you that I found these videos as a result of my nephew declaring a "terrible music day" where we all nominated videos in a facebook thread

Phone sex with Stephen Hawking

Ever wondered what it would be like to have phone sex with Stephen Hawking? You know you have! So here's what you do:

1.Get a kindle

2.Download the trashiest romance you can find (I got one called Slow Hands for free)

3.Find a particularly juicy passage (I picked one featuring a velvet member and other picturesque phrases)

4.Turn on the text-to-voice feature and prepare to be wowed. It's like your own sexbot, or the aforementioned phone sex with Stephen Hawking

Bonus points: on a romantic getaway with your husband, put on the sexy black lingerie you stashed in the suitcase, and coyly say, "A little something to put us in the mood . . ." before you start the text-to-voice. Then when you fall down laughing, you're both in a convenient horizontal position. TMI?

"Hornworms" Live!

My middle-grade short story, Hornworms, is online with the newest issue of Hunger Mountain. Check out the other great YA and MG fiction and more--I feel my hornworms are in great company!