Category: Uncategorized

This Blog is Seasonal 

In other words I really only attend to it in the summer when I have two months free of obligations to work, hurray, love summer. But I had to crank up the blog today because it’s a serious snow day, and I can’t get out and to delete what seemed like hundreds of spam comments (mostly Russian, I’m guessing here.) I can’t read Cyrillic, so it’s fun to scroll past pages and pages of what to me appear to be a kind of wing ding font. I marked them all as spam and installed the new Akismet plugin, hopefully that will filter them for a while.

screen shot by me

However, now that I’m here, I thought I’d post this picture of the results from my Valentine’s Day Love Reading promotion…many of you know that I try to publish my short work traditionally, and once my contract terms have met their obligations to the publisher, I have fun posting my short reads at Smashwords (by the way I’m also starting to market at Draft to Digital, and I post my long reads to Amazon). I do make my own covers for these works, like ’em or not (I’d love to hear from anyone with “comments about covers.”)

Let me connect the dots here. One thing that I love about Smashwords is that they assign every work I post a colour, and then they chart the colour on a graph. The give-away that I ran from Valentine’s Day to the following Sunday produced this amazing unicorn horn of swirls and colours that reminds me of an inverse ice-cream cone and it’s snowy outside. Dots connected. Snow day–ice-cream cone.

Okay, well,screen shot by me

that’s how a writer’s imagination works.

Enjoy short reads for only .99 pennies  www.smashwords.com/books/view/20

 

 

The parents have passed on. Many of my friends have gone through this or are going through the difficult process of saying good-bye to the people that introduced them to the world. For the most part my parents gave me good advice but I didn’t always follow it, until one day I realized that the only people that really cared what happened to me were my parents. They probably spoke the truth to me more often then anyone else. “Don’t do as I do, but do as I say.” Easy to say but more difficult to follow. Now I only have myself to give me advice. But at this stage of the game what advice is left to give or follow? Invest your money wisely? Too late. Everything in moderation? Didn’t always follow that rule and so I’ve lost some teeth due to too much sugar, wore high heels and shortened the old Achilles tendons, watched TV and sat too close. Now I wear glasses, and a bunch of other small miseries assail me because I didn’t heed their advice. It’s been only seven months since mom decided to step through the veil and leave things to the rest of us, and 23 years since dad passed as a result of complications from smoking. While sorting through my mom’s belongings I discovered an old fortune cookie saying that she’d saved, “Quality isn’t expensive. It’s priceless.” My mom’s last piece of parting advice. They were quality parents, not without foibles and problems, but they were priceless.