I'd call it:  TGI FRIDAYYYYY!

What a week!  It started with a nasty cold ... there was much book designing and cover correcting mid-week, and today I started on my book trailer.  *whew*

I'll admit, the trailer is shaping up to be as much fun to make as Painted Boots was to write.  It's another outlet for how thoroughly I enjoy my characters.  And since I'm unready to leave my babies on their own in the cold, cruel world, it's a good thing the trailer will take about a month to make.  Maybe by then I'll be willing to cut the apron strings, a bit.  I like new things, big projects and feeling in over my head, so the trailer is a perfect project for me!

Since I'm on the topic of Painted Boots tonight, here's the schedule:

Cover Reveal!  June 18
Release Buzz! July 22:  just prior to the Release Buzz you'll see the book available on Amazon, the trailer will start running on YouTube, and my painterly vintage side will show off in Aspen's Etsy store.
Blog Tour!       September 2

Mid-September ... I'll turn my full energies again to book deux, which as of today, is still nameless.

I'd call it: Day of the [almost] Dead

Yes, it's been a right rain-filled day of oozing sickness.  I'm no good with a cold . . . every time I get one I'm sure I'm going to die (prefer it, actually) but in the end my immune system triumphs, rebounding me to the world of the living.  'Course, the day will come when I don't rebound, but until that day arrives I may as well make the best of it and enjoy myself.

I will say that my ceaseless moaning and groaning this afternoon is likely what drove my daughter to announce that she'll live at least as long as 2013.  I promptly informed her: "You're not allowed to die before me."  That's when she corrected her prediction and announced she'll make it to 2100.

MERCY THAT SEEMS LIKE A LONG TIME FROM NOW.  But I'll admit, when I was a kid I thought I'd never see the year 2000, which came and went with a few more fireworks than in years prior and other than that, nothing special.  For those of you who may not recall, the computers didn't crash and the world went right on spinning, (obviously) just like it always will until some meteor smashes into us, creeping up, like meteors do, from the dark side of the moon.  Or all the glaciers melt.  Whichever comes first.  Today, I'd take either.

Did I mention I have a cold?

I'd call it:  Raw Hide!

Though I live in the west, I sometimes lose connection to the roots that put me here in the first place--my people come from Wyoming and Idaho.  So I love it when we can steal away from city life and head back into nature, which we do every Memorial weekend.

We're heading up into Southern Idaho and western Wyoming, which I think are among the most beautiful places ever--the Tetons, the farms, Yellowstone, wide open spaces, clear, clean air.  (You have to overlook the occasional personal junkyard, but even those are kinda cool).

Every time I head out I'm reminded of a cabby I once met in New York.  He was driving me to the upper West Side, and as we cut through Central Park I asked him where he liked to go in his off time.  He told me he'd never been off Manhattan other than to drive people to JFK International!

Maybe he made it up; I mean, I still find it hard to believe that a person might never travel farther than 100 miles from the place they were born.  Yet I'm sure it happens all the time for lots of people, and thinking on the cabby's story always reminds me that I'm blessed to be able to get out into the world and explore a little.  Because even if it's not as much as I'd like, it's more than so many others are able to do.

May your holiday be marvelous!
M

I'd call it:  Day of the Living Dead.

Because frankly, that's how I feel when I have a head cold and yes.  I have a head cold.  When I was young getting sick meant being mothered.  Now that I'm the mother, it means I get to mother myself.  Not nearly as comforting.

In addition to being ill, I'm steeped in nostalgia.  I've been working on AspenBlovesKyleT's Etsy store.  So much cool stuff will be coming on-line!  I love the retro-jewelry.  I love the hand-made cards.  I love Aspen's pottery -- it's a love-fest of how she feels for Kyle.  Ahhh.  L'amour.

I've been reading the dictionary again.  I do that sometimes.  So from time-to-time I'll post a cool word or two.  Today:  antebellum.  I started thinking on this one because I like the group, Lady Antebellum.  The word literally means 'years before the war', and is often used to refer to the time just prior to the Civil War.

Hmmm.  Now I'm wondering why they chose that particular word . . . . 

I may as well admit here and now that I've also been reading Practical Synonyms, compiled by John Bechtel, 1908.  I was going to sell this fine little book in Aspen's Etsy store, but I can't bring myself to do it.  For one thing, the lay-out is awesome: art deco fonts and flourishes.  And it's cool to see how the meanings of words, and the use of words, changes as time rolls by.  For example, a synonym for appellation is cognomen.  Yes.  I'm still writing in English. 

The title would be: Too Much for Words

I rarely watch the news.  It freaks me out.  There are only so many stories of loss and mindless behavior and twisted cruelty that I can take.  I mean, life is hard enough.  People who go around purposely making it harder are sick. 

But today, for some reason, I decided to flip on the national news and there it was: Tornado Armageddon.

I've long felt that Mother Nature takes all when it comes to obliterating us as a species (or anything as a species, really.)  I mean the dinosaurs had a one-hundred-and-fifty-million year run--far more successful than our own.  Then one day, in comes a monster meteor and that's that.

But even though I know we can't control the universe and never will, as I watched the news I couldn't blink.  I felt, and still feel, complete grief.  The loss of life.  The loss of living.  The loss of place.  I was witnessing a world, that for many people today, ended in forty minutes of brutal wind and lashing rain.  The overwhelming-ness of it is too much for words.

The title would be:  Color me Twelve

My daughter celebrated her 12th birthday today, so I have to take a moment and say:  My daughter is twelve!!!!!  Just yesterday she was a rubber-ball-toddler who could clear the counter top--not by leaps and bounds, but by running under it.  *sigh*  There was no such thing as time for me until I became a parent.  Now the years fly!

We partied at Color me Mine.  She and her friends at one table, me on my own in the corner (I would have branded myself a dork-parent, otherwise).  I painted away at the cool vase that is part of the Painted Boots buzz event give-away package.  Whoo-hoo!  My daughter thinks I'm nuts to give it away, but I did promise ....

Yesterday, instead of blogging or editing or writing, I spent eight hours scouring my book cover proof and copy lay-out.  So thank you, Createspace designer who I will never know, for your patience with my three pages of art-directing notes.  (I think the cover will be fabulous!)

The title would be: Book Cover Apocalypse

Well, I just received my first round draft of my book cover!?!  There are some good things going on, and some graphic nightmares. 

Good thing graphic nightmares are [relatively] easy to fix.  And they don't keep me up at night.

Usually.

The title would be: To Bug or Not to Bug

I’m talking insects, of course, and ants specifically.  We’ve been invaded by the mini-monsters—they’re crawling up from where the basement window wells meet the driveway, they’re crawling in from where the deck meets the house.  I pick them off the ceiling and hallway walls.  I vacuum them off the kitchen floor.  If I find one on the table or in a cupboard or on the counter I’m going to freak out in a banshee sort of way.

Let’s not even go toward the possibility that one might crawl on me in the night.

I didn’t know this until recently, but ants are like the borg.  They interact as a communal being, communicating a main idea to each other until everybody starts going in the same direction.  And apparently, each ant hill is like a fingerprint, as I’ve been told by someone who studies ants for a living.  You could transplant one colony of ants into an abandoned ant hill and pretty soon the abandoned hill would be transformed into whatever the new host group of ants left behind.  Kudos to anyone following that idea.

Have you ever wondered why those little tiny ants boil up from between the cracks in sidewalks or driveways or parking lots?  Turf war.  One group of amazons (the females do all the fighting, of course) attacks another group of amazons and they basically bite, sting and poison each other to death.  There’s a bit of leg-ripping and decapitation.  There are mortal wounds.

That part of ant-drama is not my problem, though.  I’m just concerned with keeping them from finding food in my seventy-year-old house.  And it’s weird, but some years they show up and some years they don’t.  Maybe it’s a cicada kind of thing . . . .

The title would be:  Cat Showdown at the Secretarial Corral

The secretarial pool where I work share common office space . . . five women crammed into a room no bigger than your average kitchen.  As anyone who has attended middle-grade PE knows, this is a set-up for disaster.

Apparently, last week, there was a brutal reprimand.  These women used to laugh and decorate their office and basically enjoy themselves as they worked their day away.  Now they've got a nose-to-the-grindstone thing going on.  I mean the chilling silence of the dead (as opposed to the iconic moaning of the undead).

To be fair, there was constant laughter echoing in the hall.  Jokes were rampant.  One of them ate a cricket on a dare.  One of them regularly wore dollar-store alien antennae.  They had so many holiday decorations under their desks, foot room was optional.  But I wouldn't say any of the above-mentioned deviations from normal business practice interfered with their ability to get the job done.

Or were they deviations?  Just the other day the IT guy came into my department, set up his cell phone next to the paper cutter, and pretended to chop his hand off for the amusement of his three-year-old.  And I thought the people who wrote for The Office made that stuff up . . . .

I've been a boss and I've been an employee and I've worked self-employed from home and I've been a stay-at-home mommy.  Each hat comes with its perks and its drawbacks and a constant: it's human nature to take things personally.

So now the secretaries work with lips sealed ... unless their supervisor happens to be out.

Painted Boots excerpt, chapter 1

Painted Boots excerpt:  chapter 1

1

WHEN DAD PULLS alongside the parking lot curb I have two things on my mind: it’s warm for the first day of school and my armpits are sticky.  I open the door as a few girls draw near, chatting and swishing their hair in the morning light.  They smell like Vogue perfume ads—Chloé or Jimmy Choo—and remind me of the friends I left behind in Portland.  One girl glances at me so I shrug.  “Hey,” I say.  “I’m Aspen.”

Another girl, with wavy blonde hair and sparkling earrings, says, “What, like the tree?”  Everybody laughs.

Dad pats my back and I twist round to face him, feeling stupid that he heard the whole thing.  I’m not used to his new look: white shirts and khaki pants, wire-rimmed glasses and short-cut hair.  After taking a long slurp from his coffee he says, “Don’t let stuff like that bug you.”

Over my shoulder, I watch the girls walk toward the school.

I don’t know anyone at Tower County High—or in the whole of Gillette, Wyoming.  Today could be rough, but I guess it doesn’t matter.  Everything is rough just now.  Since moving here Dad has spent his time settling into his office on the other side of town while I unpacked: dishes and books and shoes, laundry stuff, bathroom stuff, clothes.  When I finished with the house I thought we’d talk or something, but Dad only said, “You should get out.  Maybe hang at the mall?” as he gave me money and access to the car.

But Gillette has no mall.  And as for the rest of it, well, Dad should know.  Even here, in the middle of nowhere, Mom would have insisted I get ready for the school year the way I always got ready.  So like I used to do when she was alive, I combed every estate sale and yard sale and consignment store I could find and put myself together—though it was a challenge.  I’ve never had to do it all alone.

Dad asks, “Do you want me to walk you in?” and I roll my eyes.  I’d shave my head before I’d let him walk me into class like a kindergartner.  I mean, I’m seventeen.

“I’ve got it,” I say, and climb from the Jeep, hitching my over-sized bag to my shoulder.  Then I walk away, moving in a long diagonal across a parking lot filling with more beater farm trucks than should legally exist.  My new used cowboy boots sound good against the asphalt.  Bold, even.  Like they’ve been here before, and know the way.

These boots are my favorite find, ever.  I left the leather scuffed and natural, beaten soft by some other girl’s adventures.  But I painted the heels and soles a silvery sage-brush green.  Freshen things in a way that makes them yours, Mom used to say.  And so I did.

To go with the boots I found a layered short skirt sewn from sheer lengths of muted, floral fabric.  The hem taps the back of my thighs as I walk, airy and comfortable.  My sweater is tight-fitting, a grayed-green cashmere.  It’s too warm for this weather, but I don’t care.  I love this sweater.  It came from an estate sale run by three chain-smoking grannies who clung to me like shadows, begging to buy my mother’s necklace.

Reaching up, I adjust the beaded strands.  Mom always wore this necklace.  Just four months ago she was wearing it, still.  It’s easy to picture her, standing in front of our big hallway mirror, fastening the looped clasp behind her neck.

It’s painful, too.

When I pass the flagpole, where two guys in western-style plaid shirts make a ceremony of hooking the stars and stripes to a rope pulley, I feel like I’m the only one walking solo.  So I hesitate before the plate-glass entrance, my reflection waiting while I check my hair and the fit of my clothes.  Then I grab the handle, pull the door open wide, and step into the building.

Linoleum floors and painted cinder block walls stretch away in all directions.  I’m not sure where to go so for a moment I stand in the lobby, listening.  The first bell rings and everyone hurries: guys in jeans and tee shirts, a lot of the girls wearing miniskirts similar to mine.  People wave to each other, shouting, “Hey.”  Some laugh.  A few glance at me and smile.

I hope all they see, from the outside looking in, is a girl who’ll fit in with this place.

Today's Quote:  "What's that watermelon doing there?"  ---  Buckaroo Bonzai

Synonym alliteration du jour: RATIONAL, reasonable

Well, I started writing all about the fabulous rain storm we just had but my daughter was reading over my shoulder and mocking me so, yeah.  I deleted that part.  But I'll admit:  I am a push-over for thunder.  I do love wild rain.  There is something primal and appealing about lightning.  I itch to run out and dance in the weather, even as I type!  I might have made a good Neanderthal . . . . well except for the hunting-gathering thing.  And the lack of indoor plumbing.  And no ice cream.  Or chocolate.  Or good shoes.  Then there's the little problem of going all extinct.

*Sigh*

Since today is my last blog of the week I thought I'd talk about The Outsiders.  I mean, I was just dissed by my teenager and it's a classic teenaged story from the seventies. 

S.E. Hinton wrote The Outsiders forty years ago !?!  My daughter read it in school this year, so I re-read.  It's just as good as it was the first time, and the language didn't feel dated like it sometimes does in older books.  (Try reading Moby Dick.  OMG)  One thing pulled me from the story though, and that was the way the author couldn't allow the characters to swear.  Now-adays, those boys would just let it rip! 

Today's Quote:  (Hector, speaking to his brother Paris)  "You miserable disgrace, most handsome of men but woman-crazed, a seducer, a selfish fool, I wish you had never been born or had died unmarried." --from The Iliad, by Homer  (Hector's insults in this book are CLASSIC)

Synonym alliteration du jour:  mob: masses, multitude

So today I've started another read-through of Painted Boots (my forty-third, by my count), as Createspace allows a final manuscript upload before I sign off.  This gives me three weeks to do nothing but proof, proof and proof again.  I know the story so well that I decided I could read the words backwards as smoothly as I can read them forward.  I tried it and MAN.  It doesn't make sense, but yeah, the words do flow . . . .

My distraction tonight is Etsy.  My store opens in two weeks and is called:  Aspen B loves Kyle T.  It's not exactly obvious to anyone right now but me, but the store is inspired by Painted Boots and Aspen, a girl into all things vintage.  The store has so many cool 'Aspen' things ... vases and mugs inscribed with Kyle's lyrics, vintage jewelry, cards made from pressed bleeding hearts, retro Wyoming postcards, watercolors of Devil's Tower.  It's a sneak-peek into Aspen's world and by default, into my own.  I'll post a few pics of the upcoming treasures soon!

Today's cover copy comes from Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth.  An incredible book--and a worthwhile mini-series on Netflix.  (And I'm not one to recommend TV...)  "The Pillars of the Earth tells the story of Philip, prior of Kingsbridge, a devout and resourceful monk driven to build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has known ... of Tom, the mason who becomes his architect--a man divided in his soul...of the beautiful, elusive Lady Aliena, haunted by a secret shame...and of a struggle between good and evil that will turn church against state and brother against brother."

Even if you don't like historical fiction, you'll love Pillars.  It is Ken Follett's masterpiece; a saga, and beautifully written.

Today's Quote:  Good grammar is like good table manners.  It varies with circumstances, but something about it always remains constant. -- REA's Handbook of English

Synonym alliteration du jour:  convoke:  call, collect, convene


So I'm in the middle of publishing Painted Boots, my debut novel, and I need a serious distraction.  You'd think I could settle down and work on book deux, which yes, is in progress and has nothing to do with book one, but to tell the truth Aspen Brand and her beloved Kyle are so etched into my thoughts that I'm not quite ready to jump track into Maya's world.

If you followed that, you're psychic.

So while I write my business plan and finish up with Createspace and plot my blog tour and establish my on-line platform, and all in the hazy shadow of my day job and family life, I thought I'd relax with one of my favorite past-times:  reading cover copy.

Weird, I know, but I love the blurbs people write on their back covers and jacket flaps.  Good blurbs are the frosting that hints THIS CAKE WILL BE DELICIOUS.  They so amazingly hard to write.  Try it.  Your hair will gray.

A well-written blurb is hard proof that a writer knows what her story is all about.  And though that may sound asinine, I mean, don't we writers know what our stories are about?, I've read enough of my own crap-blurbs (and the crap-blurbs of others) to know that knowing the heart of your story and being able to convey it are actually the same thing.  In other words, you need to know your story really well to have clearly communicated whatever you meant to say in the first place.  I think this is why some stories ramble on.  But I digress....

Today's cover-copy comes from the astonishingly fabulous and gut-bustingly funny The Princess Bride, by William Goldman.  If you haven't read it, read it!  (Don't you hate how read and read are spelled the same?)

(drum-roll please)  "What happens when the most beautiful girl in the world marries the handsomest prince in the world...and he turns out to be a son-of-a-bitch?"

Seriously.  Read it.  It's an awesome book.