That’s Super Sweet!

Well, deep in the midst of Nano, I got tagged with a Blogging Award meme, the Super Sweet Blogging Award. Thanks very much to Natasha Hanova for nominating me! Sorry it took me three weeks or so to answer, what with the Nano Spotlights and then getting distracted by the time Nano was over.

Award rules: Answer the following five questions, and nominate five bloggers.

1. Cookie or Cake? Hmm… cookies are good, especially vanilla wafers, (need to make time to make some this holiday season,) but I have to go with golden cake. Delicious!

2. Chocolate or Vanilla? Vanilla! I love chocolate sweets, but in any case where it’s a choice, I’ll choose vanilla. (Or maybe strawberry.)

3. Favourite sweet treat? Hmm… that’s a tough one, there are so many possible sweets. A Tim Horton’s Maple Dip donut gets honorable mention, as does strawberry syrup ice cream sundae, (which I just had as a bedtime snack,) but I have to pick a Cadbury creme egg!

4. When do you crave sweet things the most? Well, I’ll grab a sweet any time of day or night, but early in the morning is probably the time when I can least resist. I love donuts for breakfast, and if I have chocolate on hand, I’ll have some well before noon.

5. Sweet nickname? I don’t really have one, that I know of. Oh well.

And my sweet nominees are:

• Elizabeth Twist
• Fantasy Writer Guy
• Fuzzy Mango
• Trisha
• Jaime  Morrow

Stay sweet, everybody!

A Day Late: Teaser Tuesday

I’m used to being a day late for cool stuff in the Blogosphere. 🙂 I was doing my bloggy rounds this morning and happened across This little life of mine, where I came across the Teaser Tuesday meme. And I don’t believe in missing out on cool stuff, so here I go.

Here be the rules:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

So, I’m going to tease from a graphic novel: “Angel: After the Fall: First Night”, the second collection in the ‘After the Fall’ series. The random page I flipped to is actually in verse, and I couldn’t resist picking two sentences that make a rhyme:

“So Lorne hit a high note, his highest that day. And people grabbed tools and jumped into the fray!”

Weekend Writing Warriors – Time Bubble Blues #2

Hey everybody! It’s time to be a Weekend Writing Warrior again, and share some more of my new short “The Time Bubble Blues.” Thanks to everybody who commented last week, and big props to the WeWriWa admins. So, here’s my eight sentences for this week!

He pushed the ‘PANIC’ button on the desk. There was no siren, no green light above the door. Jack went to the door and turned the knob—no good. The door was locked and sealed. A computer voice told him, “I’m sorry, this unit has been sealed in order to protect you. Please use the panic button if you need to exit.”

In a few minutes, he’d pushed every panic button in the room, including the one hanging from his belt. None of them worked.

Thanks for reading, everybody – if you haven’t gone already, swing by http://www.wewriwa.com/ to check out the rest of the weekend writing warriors! And I love getting feedback. 🙂

Weekend Writing Warriors – Time Bubble Blues #1

Hey everybody! I’m really excited about the new Weekend Writing Warriors blog hop meme, inspired by Six Sentence Sunday. While there are lots of similarities between the two, WeWriWa appears to have a slightly more laid-back attitude so far, and it pushes the content up to eight sentences. So, here’s my first WeWriWa snippet, from the start of my short story “The Time Bubble Blues.”

 

The clock on Jack’s bedside table clicked and started to play “Can’t Buy Me Love” from a plug-in memory chip. Jack groaned, testing how stiff his bones were, and smiled. He’d be going to his daughter’s birthday party today.

After using the bathroom, and checking on how full the toilet tank was, Jack went over to his desk, settled himself in the padded armchair, and woke up his computer. The ‘time bubble clock’ program that he’d written himself showed that it was eight-thirty in the morning by Jack time, but quarter after noon outside his bubble. He had most of an hour until Andrew came by to pick him up, so he opened a video course on whittling, rummaged around in the desk drawers to find a Swiss army knife and a few pieces of wood, and followed along with what the teacher was doing.

Jack had carved a reasonably good bear when he noticed how long he’d been whittling.

Five minutes ago there should have been loud chimes to let him know that the time bubble had collapsed and the door wasn’t sealed.

Thanks for reading, everybody – please comment if you enjoyed it and visit http://www.wewriwa.com/ to find some more great writers!

Look at me, I’m Kreativ!

Thanks muchly to Elizabeth Twist, for passing the ‘Kreative Blogger’ award on to me!

KREATIV RULZ:

1. Thank and link back to the awarding blog.
2. Answer the seven questions (or alternates, as provided by Elizabeth).
3. Provide ten random factoids about yourself.
4. Last but not at all least, hand this on to seven deserving others.

DHE QWESTIONS:

1. What’s your favorite song?

Varies with the day, but I’ll send some love out to ‘You can Always Reach Me”, sung by Amanda Stott, especially because I forgot about it when I did the Top Ten Song Blogfest. It doesn’t appear to be on Youtube, but it’s a very sweet love song full of great imagery about staying connected. I ended up working it into a Roswell fanfic I wrote, “Love will Last Forever”, because it summed up Isabel and Alex’s relationship in that story so perfectly.
Alternative Question:Name one song you listened to over and over as a teenager.

2. What’s your favorite dessert?

Just about anything ice cream – possibly a soft serve vanilla cone. Ahh, so delicious, but so fattening.
Alternative Question:What are you having for lunch today?

3. What do you do when you’re upset?

It depends. Often, sulk for a while and do things that aren’t good for me to try to cheer myself up – unhealthy food, watch some television or whatever. 🙂
Alternative Question:Describe the last time you were bored.

Lucky Seven – I got memed, again!

So, this isn’t exactly in the spirit of the Spotlight on Chris, but I’ve been tagged with the Lucky 7 meme, and I’m going to play. I’ve decided not to tag anyone else, though, just because I don’t feel up to figuring which of my friends have already played.

I’m taking the previous draft of “Won’t somebody think of the Children” as my work in progress, since I’ve been slaving away at it for months now in the Holly Lisle revise-your-novel course. Following the instructions, I have paged to page 77, and scrolled to line 7 for my starting point.

This lands me right in a bad section where Tom is talking at the reader, instead of showing anything, and I’ve decided to share seven paragraphs instead of just seven lines or seven sentences.

Let me know what you think, especially if you think it’s bad. (It improves a little bit towards the end, when Brenda shows up.)

One thing that occurs to me is the idea that the ship’s company might need to be more clearly regimented and hierarchical, just to make sure that the right thing happens at the right time, that more things can be happening at one time without compromising safety, and so on – a slightly more military mindset, as it were, though still not violent or warlike. I haven’t mentioned much about that to anybody but Jeremy, though – not sure how Melanie or the other girls would think about it.

What else can I tell you about? Melanie’s doing well with the baby, though she complains a bit about being dizzy sometime, and I was worried about that until Doctor Joe and Odin both told me that it’s perfectly normal. Julie’s doing well now too, she’s off bed rest – well, I guess you knew that she was, because she was at the meeting last week, but that was really just a ‘get out of the room for a few hours before going back to bed’ kind of thing. Now she’s completely back and only sleeping the usual amount in bed, as far as I know, and her baby boy is doing great. She and Melanie have definitely bonded as sisters, as you might have been able to guess from some of my descriptions, and I guess I even think of Paul as part of the extended family now. Other people have commented on how much time the two young women have been spending together, and how close friends they suddenly seem to be, but as far as I know Melanie only told one new person about the true relationship since giving Julie and Paul the whole story – and that’s Laurie, one of her old and close friends. I think that was because Laurie was feeling jealous about somebody new squeezing her out, so Melanie felt obliged to explain how it wasn’t really just about meeting a new girlfriend.

Mission – Spotlight on Chris, day 1

Okay, so, the Fourth Campaign has wrapped up, I’ve got nearly two weeks before the A-Z challenge starts, so I’m going to start a new series and put myself under the spotlight.

This is inspired by FantasyWriterGuy’s Two weeks of reflection challenge, but I’ve decided that I’m going to tweak the prompts as well as the timing that FWG laid out, just because some of them are really more personal than I want to get, and I’d rather do substitutions or skip rather than do a lot of excessive tap-dancing around the raw subjects.

But today, I’m doing pretty much by the book – Share ten things you want to say to ten different people right now.

1. Thank you so much for all of the time you’ve spent helping me practice over the past year. I couldn’t have done it without you.

2. What’s going on in your life now? Are you doing okay? I’ve been wanting to say something since you cancelled.

3. Are you having technical problems returning my call, or are you just too busy?

4. Take care of yourself, and feel better soon.

5. We really are going to fight zombies sometime – my evenings are just crazy right now.

6. You do a lot that nobody in the group sees to keep things running smoothly, and I’m so grateful for it, and the way you’ve welcomed a loner boy from Hamilton.

7. I love you very much.

8. It’s been so long since we’ve talked – how’s the family doing? What have you been up to lately?

9. I’ve never done this before, so tell me – what do I need to ask you about buying a car?

10. Good luck with labelling and commenting on chapters four through ten!

I’ll see you soon with another dose of sharing!

The joy of being tagged and tagging.

So, I’ve been tagged. (Kinda had to hint around for it, but anyway…)

Two different batches of questions to answer today, and one more to ask of my tagees. First, from Mina Burrows:

– Where do you find inspiration?

All kinds of places. Sometimes I trip over a story idea from something random, sometimes it’s something in a book or tv show that gets me thinking of a different twist, sometimes I go and look for story prompts. And sometimes my muse brings me notions and I don’t ask her where she got them from.

– What’s your favorite TV show?

Of all time? Has to be Firefly. (Sigh.)

– What are you reading now?

‘Currant Events’ by Piers Anthony. ‘Inheritance’ by Christopher Paolini. ‘Star Trek New Frontier: Martyr’ by Peter David. ‘Deja Dead’ by Kathy Reichs. ‘A Twist of Malice’ by Jean Rae Baxter. (Yes, I multitask my reading.)

– What’s your favorite recipe?

A spaghetti sauce that I partly got from my Mom, and partly tweaked until it’s just the way I like it.

Searchers in the Files

Okay, following a meme from Elizabeth Twist and LG Smith, I’ll share some of the most popular and strange search terms I’ve found on my blog statistics. I hope that you find them interesting. We’ll start with the popular ones.

1. ‘short dialog’ is easily the most popular search term for my blog ever, and I’m not quite sure why so many people are searching for short dialog instead of long dialog. But they end up here: A short dialog exercise.
2. ‘extra post’. Again, I find this a bit puzzling. Are these people trying to figure out how to squeeze an extra post into their own blogs, or looking for extra posts that have been added to other blogs? But I do love A-Z extra post by request: The Umbrella rant, and I hope that the searchers like it too.
3. ‘elizabeth twist’. This might be for people who are searching for Elizabeth’s own blog, but on wordpress.com instead of her home at blogspot. At least I include a link to her, as well as sing her praises, here: E is for Elizabeth Twist
4. ‘small wallpapers’. I hope that they enjoy all the fandom-y goodness here: Fanart 10: Lots of small wallpapers.
5. ‘summer glau’. Any Summer Glau fans will hopefully love the story of my meeting her: Fan Expo Diary – Part Two
6. ‘serenity analysis’. Beat sheet for the win! Beat sheet analysis for ‘Serenity’ (spoiler warning.)
7. ‘iphone riddle’. The answer is… An iPhone riddle…
8. ‘diane duane’. There’s a lot that this could lead to, but maybe they’ll start with A Wizard of Mars – Chapter One
9. ‘save the cat chapter 2’. Hopefully, this will help explain it without giving away too many of Blake Snyder’s secrets: Blog the Cat, Chapter 2 – Story Genres
10. ‘alphasmart dana’. I’ve talked about my Dana in several places, but dedicated this post to it: Dana by Alphasmart
11. ‘tess harding’. An interesting search term, but it could lead to my tribute to R is for Roswell or Fanfiction flashback: Not Written Yet
12. ‘firefly fan art’. Well, I shared some here: Fanart 9: Two Firefly Banners

And, for the stranger search terms:

• “that’s what i did and you came back to me”
• buffy/lindsey fanfiction
• davis smallville chloe nanowrimo
• faith hill & roswell
• games on alphasmart dana
• glau fan expo brown guy
• how busy is the go transit bus from hamilton on saturday nights?
• mike kelworth
• roswell liz swaps with tess
• screenwriting on the dana alphasmart
• stringing in writing
• the louvre sweater
• viable paradise waiting list
• where i made my passport im in herkimer
• yahoo game where you put characters in which room
• you can’t go home again billy joel

If you’ve got a blog that lets you see search terms that led readers to you, share your favorites and comment here to let me go look!