Tag Archives: Writing

March 11, 2013 · 0:00

Second Prize in A Beauty Contest

Do you know Michelle of The Green Study?  I discovered her during the holidays when we were both hanging out at C4C, Company For Christmas — the open blog for folks who were alone on the holidays.  Neither of us were alone, actually.  In fact, I don’t think that I “chatted” with anybody who was alone.  But I made some friends, including Michelle.  We followed each other, and I entered her Christmas Story contest.

And I won 2nd Prize!

Second Prize

 Recently, I entered another one of Michelle’s contests, this time for “The Worst Job I Ever Had.”  And I did it again.  I won second prize.  But next time, I’m going to take this bit of advice:

Second Prize -- more judges

Check out the first prize winner, The Wisdom of Life.  That job was way worse than mine.

And check out mine over at The Green Study:  The Gray Zone.

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March 6, 2013 · 0:00

For Peg O’Leg, Me and Medbh and For What Should Have Been

One if the best things about blogs/bloggers/blogging is the camaraderie.  Because the more we all write blogs, the more we all read blogs and the more we all comment on each other’s blogs, the more fun we have.  And of course, the more likely we are to meet fellow bloggers face to face in the unemployment line.

No, no, no.  That’s not what I mean.

What I mean is that, we bloggers like to spread the wealth. Share the fun.  Tell each other about other fun places to visit and enjoy.  Other folks’ blogs.  The more the merrier.  (Hell, who wants to work at work anyway.)

Today I am honored to be pulled along in the wake of one of the funniest of all of my bloggin’ buddies, Peg O’Leg at her blog Peg-O-Leg’s Ramblings.  Yup, today I’m posted over at Peg’s in her pretty darn new Wednesday feature called

“THIS One Should Have Been Freshly Pressed”!

Most of you know Peg as a gifted humor writer who can stand her ground among other brilliant Irish writers like James Joyce, Bram Stoker and Medbh McGuckian.  Unlike Joyce, Peg is NEVER boring.  Unlike Stoker, Peg never terrifies us.  And unlike Medbh McGuckian, we all know who Peg IS.  Plus we can spell her name, which is nice.

Now Peg created her “Should Have Been FP’d” feature after realizing that all of us bloggers, from time to time, hit the PUBLISH button thinking-hoping-wishing that the brilliant piece we’ve just posted will hit the Big Time.  Reach the masses.  Be Freshly Pressed.  And then it misses.  It doesn’t.  It isn’t FP’d.  Our hearts are broken when only two people end up reading that brilliant post, our STATS tank, and we need to drown our whines, in wine, ice cream and chocolate.  Or, in Peg’s case, in anything Reese’s.

This has happened to you.  It has happened to me.  But Peg, with her big heart and blog feature eased my pain.  So head on over to Peg’s to sample one of my favorite humor pieces and take in a big bunch of Peg’s.  Please?  I bribed her into including me in the feature by promising her brilliant stats.  Don’t let me down!

The Ultimate Honor

The Ultimate Honor

Here’s the link in case you missed the other three links:  http://pegoleg.com/.  Not that I’m anxious, mind you.  I just don’t have enough chocolate on hand to cope if you don’t head on over to Peg’s.

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September 13, 2012 · 0:00

Eye on the “Booker” Prize!

I am awesome.  Yup.  It’s true.  You see, well, I have a new prize.  A new award!

Yes, just the other day, I got A Booker Award!  Seriously!  Me!

What does that mean?  Well, it is awarded to a novelist of great achievement from the United Kingdom or from Ireland.  Cool!  I’ve been to both places.  I’m sure that qualifies.

The Man Booker Foundation awards the Booker Prize! But not to me.

Here is what it says on the Man Booker Award site:

Winning the Man Booker Prize is the ultimate accolade for many writers. As 1996 winner Graham Swift commented, “Prizes don’t make writers and writers don’t write to win prizes, but in the near-glut of literary awards now on offer, the Booker remains special. It’s the one which, if we’re completely honest, we most covet.”

Every year the Man Booker Prize winner is guaranteed a huge increase in sales, firstly in hardback and then in paperback. There is spin-off too in global sales of books, in future publishing contracts and in film and TV rights. Besides the fortune, the winner of the Man Booker Prize can also be sure of fame. The announcement of the winner is covered by television, radio and press worldwide.

Isn’t that cool?  Won’t it look great on my resume?

Janice, of Aurora Borealis actually nominated me for a Booker Award.  Pretty neat huh?  Especially since I will be the only novelist to win such a coveted award who has not, um, actually written a novel.  But hey, I won two Oscars without ever working on a movie.  Apparently I am multi-talented.

Oh wait.  I just looked at Janice’s post a little more closely.  Oh.  My bad.  I didn’t win the Man Booker Prize.  I won this one:

I got THIS one!

Cool!  Sorry for the confusion.  (But if you think I’m changing my resume, you’d better think again!)

I am delighted to accept it this award.  To do so, I need to

  1. Thank Janice for the nod.  Thanks so much for thinking of me, Janice.  For those of you who don’t know her, Janice is an amazingly good person, a writer of poetry, prose, of pieces that make your heart break, and your heart sing.  Of pieces that make you question the humanity of some humans, and soar at the gifts others can bring.  So thank you Janice.  You were one of my first followers.  And one of my first and best blogging buddies.
  2. I need to put a picture of the award on my blog – there it is!
  3. I need to tell y’all about five books I love.  That’s the hard part, because I love books.  I read two or three books a week.  Whichever one is in my hand is usually high on the list of my favorites – otherwise I would put it down and not bother with it.  But I will try to narrow my list.  Here are some of my favorites:

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stephenson  is the first book I remember.  My sister Beth used to read it to my brother Fred and me every night for years.  When I found the old copy of Treasure Island that Beth read from years later, the book fell open to the “Apple Barrel Chapter,” the one we begged for every night.  It was through the reading of this that Beth taught Fred and me to love books.  Good books.  She taught us to love stories and the magic you can always find in them.

Forever by Pete Hamill.  A young Irish man travels to America in colonial days.  Through an act of kindness, he is granted eternal life as long as he never leaves Manhattan.  The story traces the his and the city’s journey from colonial days to the present.  Magical.  When my sister Beth, who gave me books, was dying, this was the book I read to her in her last hours.  It is a beautiful story.  I wish I could have read her the whole book.

 

The Woman in White by Wilke Collins.  I’m a sucker for the classics.  Wilke Collins was a contemporary of Dickens.  He wrote beautifully about different problems in Victorian society, many of which we grapple with today.  The Woman in White deals with mental illness.  Poor Miss Finch is a blind woman whose life and disability is presented with dignity in a time when that wasn’t often the case in life or in novels.  No Name presents two upper class sisters who suddenly learn that by a trick of fate, their parents were somehow not legally married; The Moonstone set the stage for modern mystery stories.  He is a writer to check out if you love classic literature.  Collins’ protagonists are women and they are true heroines, all.

The Weird Sisters by ­­­­­­ Eleanor Brown.  Weird Sisters is the author’s first novel and it is so incredibly brilliantly (and differently) written.  The three sisters are complex and humorous and absolutely delightful, when you don’t want to kill them.  Just like real sisters.  The book is a gift to anyone with sisters.  Or anyone who likes to read.  Or maybe just a gift to me.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini.  A complex look at the lives of two women in Afghanistan before and during the Taliban’s rule of Kabul.

 

Ask me again tomorrow and, well, I’ll likely come up with a different group.  Because I love books.  I just can’t get enough of them.

Lastly, now I need to nominate five bloggers who can lie on their resumes, too.  It’s always hard because folks love or hate these awards, or fall somewhere in between, like me.  I tried to find folks who like awards and who haven’t yet received this one.  This is a challenge, you know!

Speaker 7 of Speaker7

Val of QBG Tilted Tiara

Frank of A Frank Angle

Cooper of Security is for Cadavers

Twin Daddy of Stuph Blog

Lorna of Lorna’s Voice

Totsymae of Totsymae

OK, so I can’t count.  Do not feel obligated to accept this award.  But I’d love to hear what you all like to read too!

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August 1, 2012 · 0:00

All the Cool Kids Are Doing It

It’s Angie’s fault.  Or Darla’s.  Maybe it’s Peg’s.  Or all three.  Mostly, I blame Angie for pulling this memory out of my subconscious when she entered this post, An Epic Adventure in Babysitting in Darla’s Psst! Hey…Wanna Hear Something Really Embarrassing? contest.  Then Peg threw her story in too, with The Substitute Babysitter.

Since all the cool kids are doing it, well, here is mine.  Don’t hate me.

 *     *     *     *     *

Unlike my cooler blogger sisters, I loved to babysit.  I was born to babysit.  And I had the best job on the planet.

Mr. and Mrs. F went out every single Saturday night, from 7 to 11 or so.  They had two really nice kids, a huge colonial house and a swimming pool.  At about 12 I started supervising kids in that pool, in spite of the fact that I bear no resemblance at all to Michael Phelps.

These folks were rich, but incredibly nice.  And they loved me.

Their house was huge, and quite old, which meant it squeaked and made all kinds of noises at night.  My much smaller house was old, too, so I was pretty much used to the noises.

But it was 9th Grade that year.  I was reading In Cold Blood by Truman Capote for English class.  Yup.  Reading about the slaughter of an entire family in their home.

To make matters worse the F’s house was being renovated.  So after the kids went to bed, I hung out with the terrifying book in a part of the house I was unfamiliar with.

There were noises.  Of course there were noises.

There were footsteps.  Upstairs.

Was it in Hadley’s room, at the top of the stairs?

Or was it in Scotty’s room, a few footsteps down the hall?

I knew it was in one of the two.  I could hear it.  Clear as a bell, on the hardwood floor upstairs.

So I did what any dedicated babysitter sitting next to a fireplace would do.  I picked up the poker.

I don’t want to kill anybody, I thought.  So I put it back.

I picked up the little shovel.  The spade.  I was ready to protect those kids no matter what.  And I crept up the carpeted steps.

I looked down the long, hallway.  I didn’t want to alert the killer to my presence, so I didn’t turn on the light.  The carpeted hallway was lit only with one measly nightlight.  But the thick white carpeting helped me see that there was no burglar/murder there.

But there was plenty of space for the burglar/murder to hide.

I walked into Hadley’s room.  She was sleeping soundly, still alive, because I could hear her calm breathing.

I had just walked into Scotty’s room when I heard true, distinct footsteps downstairs.

This time I knew it wasn’t my imagination.  Because I realized that I wouldn’t actually have heard footsteps upstairs because the carpeting was thick and luxurious and the kids were always getting out of bed and sneaking up on me.  (It would have been helpful had I remembered that earlier.)

But the footsteps downstairs were on hard wood.  They were real.

“Elyse?  We’re home!”  Mr. and Mrs. F had come home.

And there I stood in their son’s bedroom, with a shovel in my hand.

Trust me, it’s scary at night. Alone. While reading In Cold Blood. (Google Image)

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May 27, 2012 · 0:00

Overheard at the Park

You all know that I love being outside.  I often go to a park not too far away that lies along the banks of the Potomac River.  It’s a natural area, with lovely paths that go up and over hills and others that follow the river.  Still others cut through open fields.  It’s lush and green, or open and bare, depending on the season and where you are.

Now that my dog is elderly and, well, in failing health, I tend to take my long walks by myself.  It gives me time to sort out my mind, think up blog posts, get some exercise.

It also lets me eavesdrop.  Here, you can too!

*     *     *

At the entrance to a short path that heads upriver for about half a mile, stood a woman looking at her iPhone with irritation.  She was surrounded on either side by two men, one of them presumably her husband.  The other looked like he might have been her brother.

“This damn UPS app,” she complained “doesn’t say how long the path is OR where it goes!”

But you’ll get a package for your troubles!

*     *     *

Two men were walking towards me; they had obviously just seen a snake, and since there are loads of them around here, I like to know where they’ve been spotted.

“Yeah,” said the first to his friend, “there are tons of snakes around here.”

My ears perked up.

“You’re right.  And it’s you have to be really careful not to step on one,” said the friend.

“Yeah, because when you do, they act like you’ve done it on purpose.  Like they don’t even get that you didn’t mean it.”

Ummmm, Guys? It’s a SNAKE, not Disney.

*     *     *

And just now, on the Sunday before Memorial Day, I heard this:

One tall middle aged guy was wearing a short sleeve flag-motif shirt. 

He was clearly waiting for someone.  Finally his friend showed up.

“Did you have trouble parking?” said Flag shirt guy.

“Yeah, the park sure is crowded today,” responded his friend.  “I shouldn’t have been surprised.  After all, it’s a three day weekend.”

“Yeah, Memorial Day.  But, still, why are there so many people here at the park?  There isn’t a Memorial here.”

Oy.

*     *     *

Happy Memorial Day, everybody.  Hope that the dopes you run into are at least entertaining!

 

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