C. S. Rickard

I am SO glad this week is just about over. It’s been worse than usual, and I didn’t have any holiday shopping I was trying to cram into it either! I mentioned that this past weekend was the first baking I’ve done this month. I had intended to spread the rest out over the evenings and have it all done by Thursday.

Well that didn’t happen.

As it turns out, my kids conspired against me. Sean and Jess double whammied me within 30 minutes of picking each of them up from school. First, Sean announced that his science fair project is due this Friday. This is the same project about which I’ve asked at least twice in the past six weeks (yes, that’s 6 weeks) and was told it’s not due “for a long time.” We had to run to Target to buy him a black outfit (dress shirt, pants, socks and dress shoes) for his handbells and chimes concert Thursday evening. Target didn’t have the two things we needed for his project: magnets and a spring scale.

Then Jess informed me that we needed to run to her Dad’s Monday evening to pick up her band shirt because she needed it for the concert Tuesday evening.

“Concert? What concert?!”

“I forgot to tell you. We have a concert Tuesday night.”

“Great.” This week was going downhill fast, and it was only Monday!

Wednesday Richard had his last track meet and they all had a half day of school. (Why they need a half day of school two days before leaving for a two week holiday is beyond me.) He’s also assistant senior patrol leader for his boy scout troop and had to attend a planning meeting Thursday evening, right before Sean’s concert.

We ended up with packed evenings Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week. I had client work during the day and couldn’t sneak out to get anything done till Thursday. I spent Thursday morning making three different kinds of breads: cranberry-orange, pumpkin-chocolate chip, and white chocolate-raspberry. I also made the final batch of truffles: dark chocolate-raspberry.  I went out over lunch and found a bunch of holiday boxes discounted and snagged about 20 of them. I also found a store that sold magnets for Sean’s project, but they and everyone else were out of spring scales, so Sean borrowed one from his teachers. We were up till 11:30 doing his project. I’m not one of those parents that does my son’s work for him. He had to do everything himself except type it up. He wrote the words and I typed it up for him just because he can’t type yet.

I got up this morning and loaded eight gift boxes for Jess and Sean to take to school. Got home and filled another seven for Richard to take to school. When Richard got out of the car at school, I let out a huge sigh. Finally, time to breath!

I’m feeling the stress again just writing about this week!

With any luck, work the next two weeks will be slow and I can get caught up on my writing. (fingers, toes, arms and legs all crossed!)

Two weeks? Sheesh. Sorry!

The odd thing is that I actually start Christmas shopping in August and try and get most, if not all, of it finished by Thanksgiving. The theory behind this is that by December, I’ll be able to relax and enjoy the month as opposed to running around the stores and internet like the majority of frantic holiday shoppers. Of course, my theory was established before my kids started having lives of their own. Now with band, track and boy scouts on top of regular work and school functions, I find that my December is just as busy without the shopping.

Last weekend was the first time this month I’ve had the opportunity to do some baking. I made sandtarts and sugar cookies with my sons. Sean helped me with the first batch of truffles, but quickly bailed when he realized how time-consuming they are to make. That didn’t stop either of them from adding to their list of people for gift boxes though. Jess and Sean combined only need 7 boxes/tins of goodies to give to teachers, coaches, bus drivers, etc. Richard can’t just pick a favorite teacher or two. He needs to give them to all of his teachers. And since he’s now in middle school with a different teacher for each subject, that means he needs 7 boxes/tins for gifts. Oh joy!

I’ve got to keep an eye on my truffle count though, as Jess has been known to sneak into the kitchen and snag one from the fridge. She’s also been hovering over me the past two days asking when I’m going to make the breads. She loves the white chocolate raspberry mini-bread loaves I make. She doens’t seem to hear the part of my reply that includes “they’re for the gift boxes.”

I don’t mind. All of this is what makes holiday memories.

When my owner decided to visit her sister in Pennsylvania, I thought I’d enjoy the miles on the open road. She took me to the dealer where I was well oiled, lubed and washed before the trip. She even bought me new wiper blades!

We left Tuesday morning at 6:20. I handled the roads and traffic as smoothly as I always do and we arrived seventeen hours later. The weather was cold, but I could handle the weather just as well as any of those northern cars. I noticed right away I was the only hybrid around, not that I was counting or anything.

Pulling into the  gravel driveway was when my dream of a relaxing vacation bit the dust. My owner parked me under a huge tree with a bunch of big leaves. This looked nothing like the friendly palm sitting beside my garage back home. I think the tree was diseased or something. All of its leaves were different colors. Not brown or green, like you’d expect, but instead yellow and red and orange. Whatever it had, I hope it isn’t contagious to cars. I lost the count of the number of colored leaves that fell on me while I was parked there.

As if freaky colored leaves weren’t enough to worry about, some animal kept prowling around me all night long. It was dark and because my owner was asleep in the house, I didn’t have my headlights on and couldn’t see it clearly. I just knew it had fur and didn’t make a sound when it walked. At one point I felt it drop onto my hood. If I had a voice I would have screamed! It walked all over my clean hood and up my windshield. I could just feel the dirty little paw prints it left.

I had to sit there and endure diseased leaves and freaky little creatures for two whole days before my owner even remembered she brought me along. Finally she decided to use me. She drove her sister to some stores Friday morning. I didn’t care where we went as long as it was paved and didn’t have any animals crawling on vehicles. I had finally relaxed with the errands until she decided to drive me up a steep hill that was supposed to be a road. It was barely wider than a parking space and very poorly paved. Muddy shoulders covered in clumps of brown leaves followed the little path (I refuse to acknowledge it as a road) around a bend at the top of the hill. Then she drove me through a mud puddle into another gravel driveway. A MUD puddle! I couldn’t believe it. I could feel dirty water dripping off my undercarriage and mucking up my wheels. And what is with all the gravel driveways?! Haven’t these people ever heard of concrete?

When she parked me back under the diseased tree, I let out a sigh. Then I realized I was actually glad to be back under the tree. I knew at that point we had to leave for home soon or I was going to go mad. Luckily she heard me (or at least that’s what I want to believe happened) because she loaded me up Saturday morning and we left for home.

I don’t ever want to see another colored leaf, gravel driveway, mud puddle or untamed cat again in my life! What a nightmare!

I haven’t quite figured out how it happened yet, but I somehow ended up with three kids who all love music. Not just listening to music, but playing it. This is strange because I have no musical talent whatsoever and neither does their father. Elementary schools now teach kids how to read music. This was something they didn’t do when I was a kid. In fact, I still can’t read music.

Our musical journey began when Jess was in sixth grade and wanted to play the flute. She has since expanded to play alto sax and baritone sax. She’s also the drum major for her high school band. Then there’s Richard who took a year of violin lessons in elementary school before switching to handbells and chimes for two years. He hasn’t had music yet in middle school, but is looking forward to it. He still hasn’t figured out which instrument he wants to play though. Sean has been begging for a drum set for several years. If you knew my youngest, you would understand that he doesn’t need anything else to beat on to make noise. He also wanted to try violin, but I didn’t believe he was mature enough to take care of the instrument. This year, he’s finally calmed down enough that I’m letting him do handbells and chimes and he loves it.

Raising kids who know more than you do about a particular subject can be interesting. I enjoy learning from them and I think they enjoy knowing something that mom doesn’t. Of course, it also has it’s amusing moments.

Jess came home one day very excited about a new piece she was playing. It was more difficult than any she’s played before. Jess normally talks fast, but when she’s excited, I always have a hard time understanding her. I caught about every third word rushing from her mouth as she waved a piece of sheet music at me. I took the paper and looked at it.

“See how hard that is?!”

“Jess, this looks like a bunch of ants crawling on a page to me.”

She grabbed the paper and rolled her eyes. She proceeded to point and explain the complexity of the notes and the piece as a whole. I didn’t understand most of it, but was pleased she really knew what she was talking about. It’s since been a running joke between us. If there are a lot of ‘ants’ in clusters on the page, it’s usually a difficult piece.

Earlier this week when something similar happened with Sean. Driving home from school two days ago, he started talking about handbells and chimes practice.

“Guess what? We have a retard in music.”

I shot him a look. “Sean Brendan! What have I told you about calling names?”

“No mom, I wasn’t calling names. We really have a retard in music.”

I shook my head. “Well you don’t call them that. It’s not nice. You know better.”

“No, mom. It’s not a person. There are retards in music.”

I glanced at him out the corner of my eye. He nodded.

When Jess came home after school I decided to find out what Sean was talking about. “Jess, Sean tried explaining to me that they there are “retards” in music.”

She laughed and shook her head. “Not retards, mom, ritards. It’s spelled with an “i” and the accent is on the second syllable.”

“Oh.” I make it appoint to acknowledge whenever I make a mistake and immediately apologized to Sean for snapping at him about name-calling. Although, in my defense, Sean was never able to explain exactly what a “retard” was, so I didn’t feel that bad about my behavour.

His response was typical of my kids. “Told you.”

Last night I decided to have a fun dinner. I declared it international tapas night. The kids had no idea what  tapas were (rolls eyes). I decided to try some dishes that they knew, like potato skins and chicken quesadillas, but also wanted to expand their tastes. I included Shanghai dumplings, calzones, samosas, and egg custard tartlets.

The tartlets were the first things gone. All three kids loved the custard.

The dumplings tasted just like the dumplings I get in restaurants, which surprised me as I’ve never made a Chinese recipe that tasted like a restaurant dish. It was all the more surprising as I didn’t use pork, but soy sausage (I’m a vegetarian.) They came out wonderfully and I served them with a plum sauce.

I tried to cheat with the calzones and used store-bought pizza dough. That didn’t work out exactly as I had hoped. The pizza dough wouldn’t roll out completely and ended up being a bit thick for the calzones. The calzones were filled with green pepper, mushroom, and soy sausage.

The samosas were probably my second favorite dish. The filling was comprised of simply potatoes and peas with some cumin, coriander, and salt. I had used a phyllo dough to make them. I think next time I’ll use something like a pie dough. I thought the phyllo came out too puffy for the samosas.

I still have plenty of leftovers, so it looks like Monday night will be tapas night again!

LOL…I’m using the dictation software that I bought the other week. Every time I say ‘tapas,’ it types out ‘topless.’ I have three kids in the house, so don’t get excited. I’m totally G. rated.

I’m trying this one more time. My Dragon NaturallySpeaking software arrived in the mail the other day. I use windows XP and it installed without an issue. The microphone seems to work fine and I played around with it using MS Word, the software I’m using to write my manuscript. I took some time and entered all the made-up words in my fantasy novel. Entering the words into the custom dictionary was fairly intuitive. I simply typed the words and then recorded the way they sound. All of the words entered without an issue except for two. I tried repeatedly to record them but I kept getting an error for both. My dishwasher was running in the background at the time, so I suspected that interfered with the sound. However, it should have affected all of the words not just those particular two. I moved to another room and tried recording those two words. This time they entered without a problem.

I’m frustrated because this is the second time I’ve written this blog entry. I’m using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to dictate the entry and I had three paragraphs written the first time. I noticed that it does not capitalize the first word of the first sentence automatically. However it will do that after each period. When I put my mouse back up to change the first letter of the entry to a capital the backspace button acted as a carriage return, putting the text on the next line. When I hit the delete button to try and get it back up, it ended up going to a new blank post and deleting everything that I had already typed. That’s never happened before, so I’m not sure what’s going on. It doesn’t make sense that the dictating software would affect those two buttons, but I’m not sure what else could have caused it as I hadn’t said anything while doing it I simply used the keyboard.

This time it seems to working fine. Perhaps it was just a fluke. Regardless, I’m looking forward to using it to work on my manuscript this weekend. Finally.

I’ve been seeing a massage therapist for about three years now. I mentioned in a previous post that I had been telecommuting for 13 years, well all of that time has been spent on the computer. You don’t realize how messed up your body can get when you sit in front of a computer all day long, five days a week, for years on end. That is, until you arm starts getting a tingling sensation that runs from the shoulder down to the middle two fingers. And your neck is constantly tight. And more and more frequently a strip running down your hand will go numb.

Fun times!

When I told the therapist that I worked all day long on the computer and had for years, she nodded her head like, “yeah, heard it before.” Then she touched my shoulders and froze. “You were really serious about how much time you spend on the computer.” Apparently my muscles tell the story for me.

The sessions with her really help. I can’t stop working on the computer, but she’s taught me some stretches that I do along with visits to her. So the tingling and numbing sensation in my arms doesn’t appear anymore (unless I get a huge project and get stuck working 12 hour days for a week).

The workload hasn’t been too crazy lately, but it has been consistent. And the consistency has been taking a toll on my hands. I find my palms and fingers achy from repetitive strokes to the point that, I just can’t sit down after working all day and work on my manuscript. It’s been extremely frustrating.

However, after doing some thinking and research, I decided to buy a talk-to-type software called Dragon Naturally Speaking. It’s supposed to do all kinds of stuff like open applications and send email, purely on voice command. I’m not interested in any of that stuff. I just want something that I can install and then dictate to my computer and have the software type the words on the screen. I was hesitant at first, as I have quite a few made-up words in my manuscript. The software is supposed to allow you to say and type out any new word not in it’s dictionary and then remember it the next time you say it. The reviews range from so-so to great, but overall it seems to be the best that does this stuff. Most of the negative comments were for launching apps and other ‘advanced’ features that I don’t care about, so I’m pretty confident it will work for the basics that I need.

It’s supposed to arrive sometime next week.So, with any luck, I’ll be able to start working on my manuscript again without doing more damage to my hands. YEAH!!

Holt uncensored had an interesting post about publishing spending and mid-list and debut authors. They used Seth Harwood as an example of what the ‘next generation of authors’ may look like, out of necessity.

While I don’t see myself mimicing Seth’s path to publishing, several of the things he did to get published I view as beneficial and necessary to debut authors. I also agree that given the trend at the publishing houses, it will be incumbant upon the author to essentially market themselves. Of course, that means dipping into personal funds to help get the word out.

You have to spend money to make money.

When I sign a contract (yes — the power of positive thought), I am not anticipating much in the way of an advance. Whatever I do receive will go completely to marketing the book. I still have 2-3 years before I’ll have my manuscript to the point where I’m ready to query an agent, but in the meantime, I’m reading and studying everything I can on marketing books.

I don’t like going into things ignorant. I also don’t like waiting till the last minute to understand something. While I enjoy my spontaneous weekend jaunts occasionally, I’ll admit that I’m a planner. Writing is my dream job. I intend to do everything within my ability to make it a real job.

Now, for the continuing saga of Sean and the classroom pets…

I picked Sean up from school yesterday afternoon and his mouth went a mile-a-minute about his day. When it finally slowed down to a normal pace, he proudly announced, “Saturn wrapped completely around my body today and squeezed me, gently.”
“Really? Isn’t Saturn a boa constrictor?”

“Yeah.”

….”um…honey…boa constrictors squeeze you because they think you’re food, not because they want to hug you.”

“No, mom, she squeezes Mrs. B all the time. That’s how she hugs you.”

Grumbles to self, “and how they eat you.”

I’ve read of the importance of research in many places and for many genres, but had naively assumed that I wouldn’t need to do any when writing fantasy. I mean, I’m making everything up. Why do I need to research, right?

Wrong!

About a year after I first started writing, I realized that there were some things that I wasn’t sure about. Yes, I’m making up the world, but I want it to be believable. The only way I can achieve that is to determine the natural laws of that world, which will be similar to ours in several ways, and then make sure I don’t break any of them! In order to understand some of these laws, I need to do some research.

I’ll be honest, science was definately not my forte in school, so I have no problem researching any time I want to double check a fact or better understand a relationship.

One of my research issues was related to weather and geography. I needed to better understand weather patterns, specifically precipitation, so that I could lay out the geography of my world realistically.

Additionally, one of the species in my novel is the tiger, but they aren’t quite the same as tigers in this world. They look the same, orange with black stripes, however these creatures are sentient beings and can speak both verbally and telepathically. They are referred to as the ‘warrior race’ within their world. They have their own personalities, and naturally have a social structure and interpersonal skills that tigers in our world don’t have. However, I still wanted to make sure that I didn’t make them do something completely inconsistent within both worlds. I needed to better understand their behaviors in this world so that I could intelligently mimic or change those behaviors in their world. This particular subject brought me to the round of research I did over the weekend.

I’m fortunate to  have access to Big Cat Rescue, the world’s largest accredited big cat rescue sanctuary. They are located about 45 minutes from my house. Their website has some wonderful information on tigers. They also provide guided tours of their facility. I still have several questions that I couldn’t find answers to either on their website or several others that I searched, so I’m going to take a guided tour sometime this week. This will give me the opportunity to observe the tigers closer than I’ve ever done before as well as speak directly with a specialist of the species. I’m taking my camera along too. I love photographing wildlife and nature, this should be amazing!

Another example of research is geography and species compatibility. Are the species you’re creating suited to live in the area in which you place them? With the tigers in my world, I had originally intended to have them live in the desert. However, after reading about them, I discovered that they actually live anywhere with dense vegetation. Can I change that in my world? Sure. Can I do it and make it believable…maybe. I think this comes down to necessity. Do my tigers need to live in the desert? Not really. However, now I have to find another place for them to live. If having a species live in the desert is a necessity to the story, then I would need to either make another species or alter my tigers  in such a way that they are equipped for desert life.

It all comes down to research and believability. Even in fantasy, you need to research your facts so that your world and it’s creatures become real to your readers.