Oh my goodness, this is wonderful – pure eye candyish delight for those of us enamored of the Regency period and of the men we fantasize populated it. Click the above image to be taken to the video by DreamyViper on YouTube. Enjoy!
Monday Funnies: Reading to a Fault
For all my science-minded friends; this cracked me up!
Flash Friday Fiction: The Runt
The Runt – Margaret Locke
(210 words)
“He’ll never make it,” they said the day I was born. “Too small. Too weak. Might as well let him go now.” I proved them wrong, scrapping my way into this life whether it wanted me here or not.
“He’ll never make it,” they said the day I got the diagnosis. “We give him 3-6 months; maybe more with chemo.” The endless nausea, the bone-wearying fatigue – so many days I just wanted to hang my head low and give up, give in, and go off to that happy romping ground in the sky.
“He’ll never make it,” they said three years later, the day we set forth to climb this mountain.
Yet here I am.
My eyes look out over God’s grandeur, at the lush vegetation scattered amidst sharp, unforgiving rocks. The clouds are below us – below us! Who’d have thought that possible? – and the sky above is such a rich cerulean blue that I want to leap for the sheer joy of being alive.
I’ve conquered it all. I’ve conquered them all.
I reach down and pet Max, my faithful companion. He bounds ahead, ready to meet any challenge.
I smile as I take the next step forward. There’s still fight in this old dog yet.
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Let me know what you think! And please join us at Flash Friday Fiction – none of us bite (except for the dragon), and it’s a lot of fun!
Links I Love: Week of October 7th
While I try to find links applicable to a broad spectrum of people, lest I bore you with my writerly navel-gazing, in truth much of what catches my eye these days relates to the craft and business of being an author. Several of this week’s links, therefore, deal with issues facing writers today, but hey, I’ve thrown in a couple of completely-non-writing-focused links, too, just for the heck of it.
1. Why Blogging Is Key For Authors – When I first heard Malcolm Gladwell’s assertion that it takes 10,000 hours to be an expert in anything, I felt discouraged. How would I ever find 10,000 hours to devote to writing when I also wear the hat of mom and wife and taxi driver and school volunteer, etc., etc. Turns out a) I’ve been writing my whole life, and need to keep that in mind, and b) blogging not only lets me hone my skills even more, but means I have a chance of staying current in the eyes of my…9 followers (did you know you can follow my blog?). It’s all good, people. It’s all good.
2. Start Your Author Blog in 5 Easy Steps – So now you know you should be blogging (well, at least if you’re pretending to be a real writer like I am). How do you start? What topics should you address? Search no further, dear friends – here you’ll find a hilarious list of things to do (and, well, not do) as you start up your own blog.
3. This Is Why No One Follows You On Twitter – Wondering why you can’t get followers on Twitter? (Just as I’m wondering what steps I need to take to increase followership on this blog – one of which might include not using made up words like followership?) Here are several hints. And yes, can I please get an Amen on the one about sending DMs (direct messages) soliciting a book sale? Nothing sends me to the “unfollow” button more quickly…
4. Banned Romance: What’s So Bad About Happily Ever After? – Sure, Banned Books week may be over, but that doesn’t mean conversations about such books need to end, right? Here Maya Rodale takes on romance novels – in the modern sense, but also including classics such as Fanny Hill and Lady Chatterly’s Love to discuss what makes these type of books so scary in the first place. I don’t know – I’d take heaving bosoms over heavy artillery any day.
5. Things You Didn’t Know Women Invented – My mother would find this list lacking, as she has always informed us it was Katherine Green who invented the cotton gin, NOT Eli Whitney (apparently Ms. Green asked him to get the patent because, as a woman, she couldn’t legally do so – he did, and got all the credit, too.). Aside from that, though, this is a great list full of achievements by women – some of which I knew, many of which I didn’t.
6. The 35 Most Spectacular Wildlife Photos From The National Geographic Photo Contest – If a picture is worth a thousand words, you don’t need any more of mine here.
London Calling
Oh my God. I’m going to London. I’M GOING TO LONDON!
This has been a dream for a few years now, ever since I decided to stop saying I was going to write romances and started actually writing them. Now it’s coming true; my husband told me this week he is attending a conference in London in early November, and that he’s gotten the grandparents to agree to watch our kids so that he and I can go over together. I am one lucky woman. He knows. He knows how much I’ve longed for this. He even told me I can plan our whole itinerary, since I’m the one dying to experience it all in person and gather information, impressions, sensations, feelings for research…
Because how, I’ve always thought, can I write a convincing Regency romance if I’ve never been to England? Yes, the internet is marvelous for research. Absolutely amazing, when you think about it; Pinterest has allowed me to gather numerous images of various places in London and England, as well as all sorts of Regency resources. Blog posts give me other people’s insights into certain areas, interests, time periods. Thanks to Google maps, I can now zoom in on streets in cities I will never visit, see images of famous buildings, fabulous cathedrals, even people’s houses in places I will never see in real life. It’s awesome. I used this technique in describing my heroine’s visit to New York City in A Man of Character, and I think it came out fairly well. At least no beta readers have openly questioned it, and a few have said they assumed I’d been there! Score for me and my WIP.
But London? Regency London? Since time travel is not an option (except in my writing, of course!), the next best thing is to visit the London of today and see what I can learn about the London of the past. Yes, I can and have and will continue to spend hours gleaning all I can from books, from videos, from pictures on a screen. But nothing compares to being there. The sounds, the sights, the smells, the ability to touch – all of the senses come alive when I visit some place new.
I can’t wait.
I plan to mostly roam around Mayfair and the places I’ve read about in my favorite novels. I want to walk the streets, get an idea of distances, visit Hyde Park and fantasize what it would have been like to walk along Rotten Row among the peerage 200 years ago, see those gentlemen’s clubs like White’s and Brook’s in person (well, from the outside at least), find the spots where Tattersall’s and Almacks stood. I hope my iPhone can hold a zillion photos.
And yes, I will try to at least pay a little bit of attention to 21st century London. That London Eye looks amazing. Also, my husband will be accompanying me to see “Mojo“, the play in which Colin Morgan is currently starring, whether my husband wants to or not. Because Merlin remains a current obsession (hey, the stories may be medieval fantasy, but I can have a mini crush on a modern actor, right?).
So, dear readers, what are your “You Can’t Miss This” things to see/do in London? And if any of you know a good place for me to just casually bump into Mr. Morgan, could you let me know? I want to invite him to Virginia to see a play at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton with me. I’m sure he’d have no qualms accepting such a proposition from a happily married middle-aged stranger in the US, right?
Hey, a girl can dream.
And this all certainly feels like a dream. So if you happen to see a large blonde giddy American woman roaming the streets of London in a month, scrutinizing architecture and examining statues close up, hopping up and down with sheer glee on her face, give me a wave, will ya? Just don’t wake me up.