Carrots? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Carrots

Because we have the stick! 

See it there, looking so friendly and innocuous?  In this shot, it's camouflaging itself as a decorative piece, but don't let it fool you.  It's a stick.  A big one.  And it's hard.

Perfect for poking a recalcitrant writer.  Even better for whomping a slacking student. 

It slices, it dices, it makes julienne fries... Not really.  It just smushes everything into a pulp.  I guess it would make great mashed potatoes, but ew.

Why do we mention the stick today?  Well, because it has come to our attention that certain people out there in the world require a bit of motivation.  And when it comes to motivation, you really only have two options - the carrot and the stick. 

All I have around the house is a bag of old baby carrots.  If that motivates you, go for it.  They're in the wilter next to the onions and a half bag of salad.  Barring anyone's penchant for rubbery tiny root vegetables as a positive reinforcement, we're opting for the stick today.

Get out there and work.  Or the stick might be coming to visit you.  Bwa haha

(Why yes, I was feeling a mite silly this morning.  How'd you know?)

BTW, in case anyone wants to know, said stick was hand crafted from a tree in the yard of my childhood home.  (I think it was an ash, but don't hold me to that.)  My gargantuan brother wanted a walking stick, so he cut the tree down and made one.  When he left home, I took possession of said stick and have carted it all over the damn country.  It's my stick now.  Beware the stick.  It knows when you're not working and it's waiting to thump you. 

Don't Be a Bonnie

I don't know if any of y'all watch Biggest Loser, but I'd like to spend a moment today talking about a contestant who showed her true colors last night.

Bonnie is the oldest person on the ranch at this point.  She's a grandma from, I think, Boston.  Like all contestants, she's grossly overweight.  Like a large number of the obese, her knees are fucked from carrying all that extra weight all those years.  Unlike a lot of contestants, she uses this as an excuse for not exercising as hard as she could be.

And given the fact that my leg is often fucked, I can vouch for that fact that it's a good excuse - especially when they're doing exercises that work the legs.

Except last night her trainer - former tennis star Anna Kournikova - had the two remaining members of the blue team working out in the pool.  A workout that pretty much cuts out the whole "I've got bad knees' reasoning.

You see, in the pool, the excuses float away (pardon the pun).  She couldn't do a half-shit job and blame it on her knees.  She had to work.  And Anna pushed her harder because she knew the knee problems were no longer a factor. 

Of course, that's when the claws came out.  Suddenly, Anna was picking on her.  Anna was playing favorites.  It was all Anna's fault - and btw, Bonnie never liked Anna anyway, so there.  It couldn't have been that Becky (the other Blue Team member) was getting more praise because she was busting her ass.  Nope. 

What really pissed me off is that Bonnie thought she deserved as much praise as Becky without bothering to put in as much effort*.  And the scale last night proved who was doing the work.  Bonnie lost 4 lbs.  Becky lost 8. 

Bonnie's answer?  Well, of course, Becky can do it.  She's 13 years younger.  I'm guessing if someone asked Bonnie why Mike (the last blue team member to get voted off - who was only a year younger) lost so much weight every week when she didn't, she'd say it was because he was a man. 

My point is, there's always some excuse we can throw out there for why we're not succeeding.  Sometimes, it really is out of our hands.  There's one gal on the black team who's doing this with a stress fracture, for instance.  (Except she's still losing the weight and not bitching about how hard Bob pushes her.)  Life comes and screws with our plans, and there ain't a damn thing we can do about it.  We get sick, or our kids get sick. There are power outages and PTA meetings, computer crashes and financial difficulties.  There's flood, famine and plague. 

Most of the time, though, our excuses are exactly that - EXCUSES.

Don't be a Bonnie.  Don't let anything stand in the way of succeeding at what you really want to do.  Because if you let your excuses pile up, you'll never achieve your goals.


*Don't get me started on that one, or we'll be here all week.

New Pandora vs. iHeart: A Writer's Review

I don't know what it is, but I've gotten to the point in my writing life where I need music in the background while I type.  And none of my CDs seems to have just the right flavor - at least not all the way through.  Enter Pandora.  I found it and it was my salvation.  Sure, sharing it with my daughter meant the free 40 hrs went by too fast some months (until I got the kid her own account).  And yeah, the ads can be annoying - especially when they drag.  Still, I loved Pandora.

And then the same day Facebook screwed me with its new format, Pandora did the same damn thing.  All at once, I couldn't be on FB and Pandora at the same time.  And Pandora's new look was weirding me out.  Plus, for some stupid reason, Pandora kept tossing lame-ass songs into my mixes and those stupid bits of cacophony would throw me right the hell out of my groove.

Lucky me, I saw an ad for iHeart (or maybe it was a bit on CNBC about it).  I rushed right over and gave it a whirl.  I tried to love it.  I made a station using the band Bush (the seed for my main Pandora station), flipped my headphones on, and started writing.  Three songs in iHeart threw Creedance Clearwater Revival into the mix.  On a Bush station.  Talk about jarring.  Anyway, I created a Foo Fighters station and all was well again.

The only problem now was that I couldn't add new seeds to my iHeart stations.  Without new seeds, the station started throwing the same songs at me.  Three times in a row, I started the station up to Everlong by The Foo Fighters.  I love that song, but I don't want to hear it first off every friggin' time.

I also can't get a good '80s Dance Music station on the damn thing, so I was switching to Pandora every time I exercised.  And iHeart's P!nk station blew chunks hard enough that I had to start a Sara Bareilles station just to work on UEQ (which is a book that needs Angry Girl Music in the background).

So, I went back to Pandora.  Low and behold, in the time I was away, they fixed the whole 'not friendly to FB' thing.  They also stopped throwing weird bands into my mixes.  For the past couple days, they've played nothing but lovely lovely dark and twisty bands in my Bush mix (the songs Djinnocide craves).

I know iHeart is in its infancy.  I tried to give them feedback so they could make their station more writer friendly, but the feedback area was too confusing.  I may go back to them someday when they've made themselves more like Pandora - without the annoying ads (which also got fixed and don't drag so much).  Plus, it never hurts to have a backup.

For now, though, I'm with Pandora.  It does what I need it to do - which is play the music I need when I need it, with neither songs nor commercials that drag me out of my groove.

Do you use an online radio station of any kind?  Have you tried these?  What do you think?

Lyric Tuesday - These Words

I've been thinking a lot about my work and what it means and whether I'm wasting my time.  So for me, the song These Words by Natasha Bedingfield is especially poignant right now - I mean, if you pay less attention to the chorus and look at it from a novel writer point of view as opposed to a song writer. 

(And for the record, the emphasis below is mine.)

These Words
Natasha Bedingfield

These words are my own
Threw some chords together
The combination D-E-F
It's who I am, it's what I do
And I was gonna lay it down for you
I try to focus my attention
But I feel so A-D-D
I need some help, some inspiration
(But it's not coming easily)
Whoah oh...

Trying to find the magic
Trying to write a classic
Don't you know, don't you know, don't you know?
Waste-bin full of paper
Clever rhymes, see you later

These words are my own
From my heart flow
I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you
There's no other way
To better say
I love you, I love you...

Read some byron, shelly and keats
Recited in over a Hip-Hop beat
I'm having trouble saying what I mean
With dead poets and drum machines
I know I had some studio time booked
But I couldn't find a killer hook
Now you're gonna raise the bar right up
Nothing I write is ever good enough

These words are my own
From my heart flow
I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you
There's no other way
To better say
I love you, I love you...

These words are my own
From my heart flow
I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you
There's no other way
To better say
I love you, I love you...

I'm getting off my stage
The curtains pull away
No hyperbole to hide behind
My naked soul exposes
Whoah.. oh.. oh.. oh.. whoah.. oh..

Trying to find the magic
Trying to write a classic
Waste-bin full of paper
Clever rhymes, see you later

These words are my own
From my heart flow
(Don't you know)
I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you
There's no other way
To better say
I love you I love you

These words are my own
From my heart flow
I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you
There's no other way
(There's no better way)
To better say
I love you I love you

These words are my own
They're from my heart
I love you, I love you
That's all I got to say, can't think of a better way
And that's all I got to say
I love you, is that okay...

Excuses Excuses

We all have excuses for why we don't get done those things that we're supposed to be doing.  So, in honor of those little things that help us procrastinate, here are a few of today's excuses up front.

- I cut my right index finger yesterday and typing makes it hurt

- Today is the Michigan vs Michigan State game!  Go Blue! (They lost.) =o(

- I really need to take a shower.

- The cat needs her claws clipped.

- I started Kristen Painter's Blood Rights last night and I really really want to know what happens. (read three chapters)

- I bought that stuff to make cake cookies over a week ago and I really should make those before my husband eats all the chocolate stars.

- The blanket I'm making for my oldest sister isn't going to crochet itself. (crocheted a few rows)

- During yesterday's procrastinatory cleaning, I missed dusting that thingy-bob under the mirror and all the geegaws on it.

Okay, now that those are out there for the world to see, I can move on and get some writing done.  After all, I've only got two hours until FOOTBALL!

What excuses are keeping you from doing what you need to do today?

Updated @ 1:48pm - Still haven't written and still not feeling the urge to.  Maybe tonight.

'Cuz That's How People Talk

I once had a crit partner who would note every time I used the phrase "I could care less".  It was a pet peeve of hers, because obviously you can care less than you already care.  The correct phrase is "I couldn't care less".  Problem with using the correct phrase every single time is not everyone speaks 100% correctly 100% of the time.

Personally, I've always said "I could care less'.  For years I've been wrong.  Now I could justify my incorrect phraseology.  Sure, I already care little for whatever I'm talking about, but if it gets any more boring, I could, in fact, care less about the subject.  But yeah, it's still wrong.

And you know what?  I don't really care.  I'm not writing my Masters Thesis for English.  I'm writing fiction - about flawed people who don't have Masters degrees.  Often they're lucky if they got an education at all (especially in the case of genies, some of whom were born before formal education, or in the case of a dystopian world where schooling may not be the most important thing to society any more.)

They're just people out there doing amazing things with the gifts they have.  They use bad grammar and end sentences with prepositions.  And they start sentences with conjunctions.  They even sometimes use cliches - because :gasp: people out there in the world speak and think in cliches. 

Your average dude - even the ones who end up doing amazing things - don't spend time worrying about whether their English is correct.  They say folksy things sometimes and they don't worry too much about rewording a phrase because tons of other people use it.

And yet, writers get nailed for it every time.  Funny.

Anyway, as a reader, I don't mind when people use incorrect grammar in dialogue - or when the POV is first person (which pretty much makes everything dialogue when you think about it - it's dialogue between the MC and other characters or between the MC and herself or between her and the readers.)  In fact, I'd say I like it even better than a writer who strives to make everything so correct, they lose the integrity of their character.

So, I say, use whatever phrase feels right.  And if it ends up getting someone's undies in a twist, so be it.  'Cuz that's how people talk.  It ain't right, but it's more real.

(Disclaimer:  If you're going to play with the rules of English, please for godsakes, know them first.  Don't just slap the words down and when you get called on their wrongness, say "I meant to do that".  It's disingenuous and it sucks.)

Picture Pause - Catitude

Here's Max next to the hugest tumbleweed I've ever seen...

He couldn't care less.  (And for the record, isn't he gorgeous?)

And Kira attacking a stringy-thing she loves...

She's large and in charge. 

What's your catitude today?  Do you care less or are you feisty?