Sunday Update - 2026 Week 12

Hello.  I'm up obscenely early for a Sunday, but that's on the cats.  They didn't like last night's food, so they're being turds.

I thought about writing and editing this week.  That may be a sign that I'm jones'n for it.  Shhh, don't frighten the gumption away.  Marketing went crickets on me.  I only moved 15 copies of UNEQUAL.  :shrug:  Tomorrow starts a 'series bonanza' - something different I'm trying - wherein all the books in the A Model Curse series will be free for 5 days.  I've already set up tomorrow's post on that.  

I started reading a book.  Woot.  I'm about a quarter of the way through Leadership by Rudy Giuliani.  

No baking.  I did make a really tasty sweet & sour chicken dish, even if the breading on the chicken did go pear-shaped* on me.

On the activity front, I was a little active this week.  It was mostly garden work - removing detritus from the outside beds and working on the potted plants on the deck.  We did walk once, though.  Go us.  I haven't weighed myself.  Weight: Fat

The potted plants seem to be doing okay.  I'm not sure if I mentioned that 3 out of my 4 pots worth of tiny carrot plants died, but the 4th pot is doing good.  I will be thinning that this week and replanting the other pots with new carrot seeds.  I have 1 tiny potato plant coming up, which thrills me no end.  The repotted green peppers are all doing well.  All six of my redbud trees have leaves.  The redbud I thought was dead is trying, so yay.  Both of my remaining dogwood trees have tiny leaves.  The three mystery trees are all doing really well.  I'm no longer sure that one is a black cherry, but I'm getting more sure that one is a buckthorn.  We'll see.

I did try to do some carving this week.  I was really getting into it when the gouge slipped and I perforated my thumb knuckle.  That'll teach me.  Of course, I wasn't wearing the safety gloves.  I hate gloves when I have to actually do anything with my hands.  Of course, I'll be wearing them the next time I carve, because while I am sometimes foolhardy, I'm not stupid.  Live and learn.  Thankfully, it wasn't a large perforation and I'm a good clotter.  I'm just waiting to be 100% sure it won't open back up before I go back to strenuous hand activities.  

Other than that?  :shrug:  I hope you had a good week last week and that this coming week is amazing for you.

*a British phrase that I appreciate, so I'm gonna use.  What's English if not an opportunistic language that rummages through the pockets of other languages looking for spare phrases and shiny euphemisms?

Sunday Update - 2026 Week 9

 Argh.  Time change... I'm later posting this than I thought I was.  Derp.  

I didn't get much sleep last night.  I went to bed at 9 like a good girl, but I couldn't sleep and then Sawyer was being a turd, so I just got up.  I finally went back to bed at midnight.  Unfortunately, I still laid there.  And I had no sooner fallen asleep when I had to pee.  

Anyway...  Per my current outlook on life, no writing or editing.  I did some marketing for AD, but didn't really move many books.  Tomorrow WIOH goes on the freebie block.  (You might notice that for this 90-day run, so far, the books have been in the order in which they were published.  I'm not sure how long I'll continue this, but there it is.)

I'm still reading duMaurier.  I'm about halfway through.

Earlier this week, I made raisin walnut quick bread.  Yums.

On the activity front, it's been less about burning calories than accomplishing stuff.  I did some gardening and some carving, groceries, etc.  I haven't weighed myself since last week.  I don't expect the number to have changed.

As for carving, all my supplies are here and I'm in the process of teaching myself how to use the tools.  I have a big chunk of cedar on the sunporch for that purpose.  While I was messing with it, a thin piece came off in my hand, so now I'm carving on that.  It's probably 8 inches by 4 inches and maybe a third of an inch thick.  It's shape reminded me of feathers, so I'm trying to make that happen.  I also might cut the end of the chunk off to make myself a cube of wood and turn that into a sphere.  Additionally, my salesman brain got the idea to carve baby bunnies wearing diapers... and now I know that there are places where you can buy diapers to put on rabbits.  Anyway, I'm still excited about the hobby, so yay.

On the gardening front, I planted the carrot seeds and the potato chunks.  Now we wait.  Still no sign from most of the trees that they are, in fact, still alive.  :shrug:  It's early yet.  If they don't make it, I'll use their pots for veggies and other volunteer trees and try again next year.  This isn't a short game I'm playin' here.  Oh, and I need to move my pepper plants outside.  Heh, one of my peppers has a carrot growing in with it.  A baby carrot I bought to eat was starting to grow in the fridge.  I cut the top off and stuck it into a pot with one of the peppers.  It's kinda cute, so I'll keep it.

Anyway, I think that's it for me this morning.  Not exactly what you might have stopped here looking for, but I hope my humdrum existence was a little interesting for you.

Thursday This n That

Hang on a sec... I need more coffee... Okay, I'm back.

My Amazon order was supposed to be delivered yesterday. It was on an Amazon truck, headed this way.  We waited.  And waited.  And when it got dark, we turned the porchlight on.  At 9, we finally gave up, turned the light off and went to bed.  This morning, Amazon says it's been delayed due to weather.  No biggie.  We did have one hell of a sploosher.  Still, it would've been nice if they'd mentioned the possible delay yesterday afternoon.  Sort of a 'hey, it looks like there's a possibility of our vehicle getting either blown off the road or submerged in the deluge, so we're probably not gonna make it' thing.  Anyway, now they're predicting delivery on the 7th.  Two days?  The weather wasn't THAT bad.  No swirly-whirlies or anything.  :shrug:  Yeah, there's nothing important in my order.  Carving design stuff mostly.  It's the idea that irritates me.

I wonder what all this rain is doing to my newly-planted carrot seeds.  Eh, time will tell.

The coffee's not helping yet.  I need a smoke.  Hang on.  Be right back...  Okay.  Thanks.

Yesterday, the neighbor kid was walking the road by himself.  He's like 7, I think.  He's a good kid and this is a fairly safe neighborhood, but we were concerned.  I wasn't allowed to leave the yard by myself until I was 10.  Of course, we did have those boys that got murdered about 10 minutes east of town when I was little.  Maybe I worry too much.  It's the grandmother genes I will never use poking their heads out, most likely.

Of course, after that, the episodes of the crime shows we wanted to watch seemed to be all about kids - one was cops tracking a pedophile ring, another one had a guy who'd murdered a kid.  We settled on an episode of Harry Wild that only featured teens peripherally and none of them got hurt.  Then we watched a true-disaster show.  

I had planned on making my first cuts into woods yesterday, but it was so damn gloomy out that the light sucked out on the sunporch where I wanted to carve.  Oh, well.  The wood's not going anywhere.

Okay, I think that's it for me.  Anything you want to add?

Crazypants for the Carving Thing

Okay, so maybe I went a little crazypants, but I'm jumping into this woodcarving thing with both feet.  I bought the books and I bought the tools. I've ordered the stuff* I'll need for designing what I will eventually carve - charcoal pencils, tracing paper, carbon paper.  All in all, I've spent about $135 on this so far.  Thank goodness I don't need to buy wood.

I already have several pieces of fine wood set aside.  I have the dogwood and the lilac pieces, loads of cedar, and some smaller black cherry set aside.  There's a persimmon tree that needs to be dug out of one of our wood piles, which I'll do today.  Years ago**, I also set aside a few pieces of unidentified wood that I hope will make excellent walking sticks.  Oh, and there's the beaver wood I've collected.  I kinda know what I'm going to do with the beaver wood, even if I don't know exactly what kind of wood each of the pieces are.  

If all of this works out, I will start selling pieces.  That is obviously down the road.  I don't expect to start cranking out saleable goods immediately.  Hell, I'm half-afraid I won't turn out anything that doesn't look like crap... ever.  

There's also the distinct possibility that I will be limited by my already crappy hands.  Man, they're hurting this morning and I didn't even do anything to irritate them.  (Other than typing this post.  Blerg.)  How I'll handle using them to push sharp metal through wood remains to be seen.  

But I'm gonna try.  

All I know right now is that I'm excited about doing this and that's a good feeling.  It's been a while since I was this excited about any endeavor.  (Probably like 11 years... which is how long it's been since I started my self-publishing journey.)  

I guess the big hope is that I'll bleed some of my visual creativity onto the wood.  I used to be really into creating art.  Hell, I took 4 years of art classes in HS and one in college.  I ought to be able to do something, even after all these years.

Not sure if I'll continue to detail my carving journey here, or create another blog.  :shrug:  Time will tell.  Wish me luck.

*All ordered stuff is due to be here by Saturday, so I have plenty of time to start practicing carving before I get into design.

** which tells you how long I've been thinking about doing this.

Sunday Update - 2026 Week 8

Well, we're bombing the hell out of Iran.  Yay.  The Ayatollah is dead.  Also yay.  We're hitting military targets, those fuckers are hitting civilian targets.  Not so yay and also proof that what we're doing needs to be done to completion and not half-assed like the Gulf War.  The good people of Persia are happy we're doing what we're doing.  Anyone not happy can go pound sand.  But they better do it fast before we turn it into glass.  Glass up your ass.  :gigglesnort:

Anyway, my life...

No writing or editing.  I'm not sure when I'll do that again, but I'm not calling it quits, so the blog title stays.  I did some marketing, which for some reason took off like a rocket and garnered me some sales.  I finished February with 17.16 books sold for $29.76.  Not big money, but better than a sharp stick, so I'm happy.  And I've already got page reads this morning so my March dashboard doesn't look like a ghost town.  I'm not sure which book I'll pimp tomorrow, so stay tuned.

I read two books on wood carving this week.  One on whittling and the other a more comprehensive volume.  I'm also slowly making my way through The Flight of the Falcon by Daphne duMaurier.  

No baking.

Activity... It was a busy week for me.  I did something active 5 out of 7 days.  Early in the week, when it was still cool, I worked in the woods.  Other days, I did cleaning projects.  One day I did gardening.  I surprised myself by actually discovering visible biceps.  Woot, I have muscles again!  Unfortunately, I also ate like a horse this week, so... Weight: 177.2  =op

My wood carving hobby is getting exciting.  Like I said, I read two books about it, and since my tools arrived on Friday, I can now get started learning by doing - which is my preferred way to learn anyway.  

As for gardening, I moved all my baby trees outside.  I also filled pots with dirt and I'm ready to plant carrot seeds.  I'll be ready to plant potatoes once I cut my starter spuds into quarters, dry those cut edges, and buy more dirt.  All things in their own time, I guess.  I'll also be planting tomatoes once the local store starts carrying seedlings.  Oh, and I have three green pepper plants that made it through the winter in my spare room, so those'll be going into pots and outside once the weather is guaranteed to not turn to freezing.  

All in all, life is pretty good here.  I'm busy-busy, even if it's not writing related, and I'm okay with that.  (Not super-okay, otherwise, I wouldn't feel the need to go on and on about it, but okay enough for now.)

How are things in your world?

The Carving Spectacle?

I've said this before and I'll probably say it again at some point in my life, but I'm not sure right now why I still call this blog 'The Writing Spectacle'.  Lord knows I haven't been writing or even editing much lately.  I'm not saying I will never write again, but it's not looking good right now.  

Right now?  Well, I'm getting all jazzed about wood carving.  As I might've mentioned a couple hundred times, I live in the woods.  We have about two and a half acres of mixed growth woods - hard and soft woods, deciduous and evergeen.  All that wood is begging me to do something with it.  

Sure, lots of it is for burning.  But it doesn't all have to be burned.  This is especially true of the special woods.  I'm talking dogwood and redbud and persimmon, and one case, lilac.  Why burn it when I can make it into something pretty?

Of course, I have no clue about carving anything right now.  To that end, I bought a book on whittling (the easiest of the wood carving methods).  I received that yesterday and it's pretty short.  I read it and learned a little bit, but it's not quite what I'm aiming for.  To that end, I ordered a better book on wood carving and... :drumroll:... a set of wood carving tools.  They'll be here Monday.  

Now, because I'm kinda weird, I've already been collecting interesting wood.  I have several pieces of beaver-chewed wood, and some wood that I thought would make excellent staves.  I also have a couple of root balls - cedar and dogwood - that looked like they might be interesting to carve something.  Now that I'm actually going to do the carving stuff, I added some dogwood that the fallen sycamore killed.  I can't wait to dig into that stuff.

Being a total novice, though, I'm going to start by carving cedar.  We have TONS of cedar.  It's not really great for burning in a woodstove, so it's in various piles around the property.  I can use that to practice on.  (I think.  I'm still learning which woods carve best.  If nothing else, it'll be a learning experience.)

The main thing right now, I guess, is teaching myself to carve without losing a finger or winding up with stitches and a bunch of really interesting scars.  Fingers crossed while I still have them.  ;o)

The writing?  It's still there.  I'm still working on editing Duke Noble #3, here and there when the mood strikes me.  The problem is that the mood is striking me less and less.  Maybe it'll get better this summer.  One can hope, right?

Sunday Update - 2026 Week 7

Sorry I spaced out last week and didn't do a Sunday Update.  There really wasn't much to talk about that week anyway, but still, it was rude of me.  This week... Well, there's not much to talk about either, but here I am.

No writing, but I did do some editing.  I really need to get off my ass and get this book finished.  In order to do that, though, I need to stop wondering whether anyone actually cares.  (Beyond a couple of people, that is.  They know who they are and they know how much I love them.)  I marketed, but it was pretty much crickets.  Tomorrow, Dying Embers goes on freebie, so we'll see if anything comes of that.

In reading news, I started a SF, read about a third of it, and DNF'd it.  It wasn't bad.  It was just not giving me any reason to finish reading it.  I sometimes wonder if that's what other people feel about my books.  (Then I remind myself I have plenty of people reading my books all the way through in KU.)  I started reading Flight of the Falcon by Daphne duMaurier on Friday, though, so I've got that going for me.

In baking news, I made a chocolate oil cake with strawberry jelly and vanilla frosting.  Yummers.

On the activity front, Hubs and I are over the crud finally, so we're making an effort on turning back into humans, as opposed to the slugs we were.  While it was still unseasonably warm, we took walks Mon, Tues, Wed for about 2.15 miles.  Then it got cool and we worked in the woods Fri and Sat for around 3 hours.  I also did some cleaning and shopping.  Weight: 176.2 (the poundage I lost to the flu jumped right back on me... derp)

Due to the woods working, I'm pretty sore today.  Throwing logs will do that to a body.  We're mostly through cleaning up the top branches of that sycamore that fell over 2 years ago, so yay.  Funny thing about that sycamore.  It turned brittle.  I went to saw the limbs and they snapped off in my hands like bread sticks (the crunchy kind, not the Olive Garden kind).  Good thing we weren't planning on trying to burn that.  

Speaking of the downed sycamore, that bastard tree took out two perfectly good dogwoods when it crashed.  I've got a large chunk of the bigger dogwood that I may try to carve into someone once I get some carving experience.  I'm thinking I need to carve a dog out of the dogwood, or would that be too obvious? :smirk:

Oh, and I got our taxes done yesterday.  Woot.  If you're using TurboTax, you have until 2/28 to do them at a discount.  Which was enough of a poke in the ass to get me to do mine.

I think that's it.  I'll try not to forget to post on Sundays from now on.  Have a great day and an awesome week.  :hugs:

Updated:  After Silver pointed out that the title of today's blog said 2025, I changed it.

This n That Friday

Okay, so I woke up this morning and was all like 'wait, yesterday was Thursday???' cuz I totally forgot to post.  I'd blame the flu, but we're pretty much over it. (Except for the cough which boomerangs back on ya like bad Kung Pao chicken.)  Part of it is the flu, though, because it got me all off track - well, worse off-track than I'd already been.  Anyway, I'm here and so let's do some this-n-that, k?

Sawyer does this new thing where he feels like he has to be in my lap in the mornings when I'm at my computer.  This makes typing fun.  Sixteen pound cat between me and the keyboard.  On the other hand, Finn is seriously focused on something underneath the dishwasher this morning.  I'd like to think it's a cricket, but I fear it's a mouse.  I just hope he doesn't try to dig for it and end up breaking the plastic sheet that hides everything underneath the dishwasher.  These cats have broken more things, I tell ya.  Back in 1988, when I graduated HS, I worked at a restaurant with these two really old ladies.  (Bear with me.  This ties in.)  One of them gave me a set of antique, metal frames with pretty patches of what looks like either wrapping paper or wallpaper in them.  She wasn't rich, so it was all she could give, and I assume they'd been hers.  Anyway, she was a wonderful old lady and I've cherished them all these years.  They're hanging on the wall here in the office.  Well, a couple days ago, Sawyer must've jumped up the wall off the side table I have there and knocked one of the frames off the wall and broke it. The actual frame, not the glass.  Turd.  Not sure how I'm going to fix that.  Anyway...

It's been warm here.  Like 70s warm.  And windier than all get out.  Today and throughout the weekend, it's supposed to be cooler, so we can finally get back into the woods.  We have things to do before summer and we'd like to get them done.  Sheesh, Mother Nature, get a grip on your seasons, will ya?

I ordered a book on whittling.  Yep, I am going full-on redneck.  Anyway, we've got all this wood and I'd like to do something with it other than burn it.  The start of that is a how-to book on the simplest mode of wood carving - whittling.  Once I get that under my belt, I'll look into actual carving tools and more involved instructions.  Eventually, I'd like to make walking sticks and maybe staves.  Things I might sell.  We'll see how it goes.

Okay, I think that's enough out of me today.  I should get cracking on other stuff before the day gets away from me.  Have a good one, and a great weekend.  =o)