On Getting Knots In One's Head From The Universe

Remember when I wrote about "ask and ye will receive"?  Yeah.  About that.....

The updates since then are as follows:

1) I have the face and form for my Stefan Savoldi, who has offered to do a book cover, set it all up with a photographer, etc.  (Daniel Sobieray, below)

2) I also have the face and form for my Kelly Starbird, who happens to know the model who is portraying Stefan, says they have good chemistry, and is also willing to do the shoot for the cover.  (Jenna Chapple, below)

3) When I was quoted a price for the above, I thought all was lost until next year's tax return, but on the business card that I have to cover the expenses for Northern Bard Publications, I just got an increase in my credit limit....more than enough to cover the quoted price plus any photoshopping, etc. that will buy me time until next year's tax return, which can pay off the card, if needed by then.

4) I've been getting all kinds of things in my emails about ways to promote the book(s) without high costs, so I'm actually thinking of doing a 2nd addition of the first book with some major gaffs corrected and perhaps a bit more about what happened to Marcus Longley after the trial at the end.

Each of the above things I've received when I asked have hit like a baseball bat to the top of the head, so I've come to a couple of conclusions about my life at the moment.

OBVIOUSLY, this book is supposed to happen and have a beautiful cover with two very kind, sexy models on the front.

OBVIOUSLY, the first book to officially be published by my fledgling company is going to be something worth promoting.

OBVIOUSLY, I can put my fears that I'm doing the wrong thing to rest and just enjoy the ride that the Universe is letting me know, firmly and without question, I'm supposed to be taking.

AND

OBVIOUSLY, I'm going to need some kind of a helmet to protect against getting bopped on the head by the Universe, as that baseball bat the Universe seems to like using on me kinda hurts sometimes.....

Too soon old, too late smart

The saying I used for my title today is something I saw a lot growing up, usually on a plaque in a gift shop when I was looking for something to have as a souvenir to bring home.  I always got something else, often for someone else in the family, like when I brought home a plaque from Bar Harbor that said "Made in Maine by Maniacs" to have in our house because it described everyone who lived there but one.

Mom was "made in Canada"....

But that's not what I came to tell you about.  I came to talk about the draft....

No, wait.  That's the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement.

What I came to talk about was the fact that, when celebrating his 29th birthday with my son, I realized that I'm getting old.  Yeah, I know, if you were to ask him, I've always been old.  He'd probably tell you that, not only am I older than dirt, but my first pet was a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

He lies.

It was a saber tooth tiger, and I wouldn't recommend them to anyone.  Let me just put it this way for you to picture in your head.

LARGE cat.
small cave
Cat litter in places that I don't want to even discuss........

Ok.  Maybe I'm not THAT old.  I just feel that old some days.

So how old am I?

I'm old enough to be living in the future I was warned about through books like Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles".

I'm old enough to know better.

According to a friend, I'm old enough to be considered a cougar if I still like looking at young, well built models to represent the characters of my books.

Yeah.  So dirt DOES have a few years on me, but on those days when I wake and feel like I was not only run over by a truck, but like the driver backed over me to see what he'd hit, I think about some things that I've heard about aging.  This is one of them that seems to say how I feel on those days:.

"I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread." - Bilbo Baggins, "The Fellowship of the Ring" by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Other days, when I'm not feeling quite so bruised and battered just from trying to get a good night's sleep, I realize how young I am.

I'm still young enough to slide into my kayak for a sunrise paddle on the lake down the road from where I live.

I'm young enough to still hike up mountains, though I use a walking stick these days and take a bit longer for the upward march than I used to.

I'm young enough to believe in love at first site, soul mates, and that love can conquer all if the participants are willing to fight for their love.

True, I color my hair, but not so much to cover the gray hairs, of which there are more each year, but rather to lighten the dark, dull color that my hair has gone to with my age.  My pale skin just doesn't look right with me as a brunette, especially as I'm prone to big dark circles under my eyes that make people constantly ask me if I'm sick or perhaps just tired.  (Frankly, I get sick and tired of being asked if I'm sick and/or tired....*grin*)

I use products that are supposed to help the skin around my eyes, not so much because I'm worried about crows feet, but to get rid of some of those dark circles I mentioned above.

I have owned a cane since the tender age of 36, when I was working as a janitor and caused an accumulative disc injury in my lower back.  On certain days, when the weather and my activity level cause the disc in my back to swell up, I have to use the cane as something other than a threat of something to beat my kids with when they're getting too rude about my age.

I'm always surprising people when I reveal my true age, as obviously I don't behave like I'm really the age that I am.  I always tell them that I don't know HOW to act my age, as I've never been this age before....

And I always have little poems or quotations that can express how I feel:

"Age is strictly a case of mind over matter.  If you don't mind, it doesn't matter"
- Jack Benny

"I dread no more the first white in my hair,
Or even age itself, the easy shoe,
The cane, the wrinkled hands, the special chair.
Time, doing this to me, may alter too
My anguish, into something I can bear."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Do not regret growing older.  It is a privilege denied to many."
- unknown

Like the friend who likes to tease me about my "cougar tendencies", I'll keep coloring my hair only until the roots are lighter than the color I would be using on them.  Like the cougar she accuses me of being, I'll continue to look at photos of handsome young men to represent the love interest in my romance novels and will admire the many shapes and colors they come in.  (I also admire the way the young female models are put together as well, but for some reason, I don't get as much grief for seeing the artistic beauty of a portrait of a young woman as I do for a young man.  I've never quite understood why, when I've felt no urges to "hit" anything other than my husband's bod for years now, people always insist that, if I admire a male and a female equally, I must be wanting to "jump his bones" while I just want to BE her.......)

And don't let me hear any of you making jokes about my age.

I'll hit you with my cane.

"Ask and Ye WILL Receive" (and who ever believed it was that easy?)

Yes, I know....

I just posted to this blog yesterday.  But have I ever mentioned how inspiration can be at times?  It's a "write it or lose it" world for a writer, and therefore......THIS:

I've discovered an odd phenomenon happening on my Facebook page, and it's not necessarily because of who I have on my friends list.  It's more of a situation where I'm starting to feel like I have an angel on my shoulder, and if I listen and obey what she's telling me, I can get what I asked for - within reason.

Take, for example, what happened last week.....

I've been merrily writing along on "A Wild Tiger's Heart", the third in The Tiger Series (as the publisher, Write Words Inc., termed it).  As I hit points when the characters are mulling over where I'm going next with it, I drop terms into search engines and see what pops up (i.e. "Italian Male Model" or "Native American Female Model") and see what comes in for results, sometimes seeing something I can use on the Facebook Fan Page for the book, but sometimes just getting lots of those pink bunny slippers I've mentioned in past posts.

And, of course, when I'm not even at home, I think of things that I can do for this book, such as the video book trailer like I did for the first two books last year.  The video trailers on You Tube may not be getting much play, but when one has no budget for marketing, one uses all the free tools available.  But, of course, to produce a video for the book, I need to find the models to use for the characters.

Brain fart time...

On the 5th of June, while at work, it suddenly struck me that I have a whole bunch of people on Facebook who helped me out with the last book.  Why not ask them?

So on Friday, June 6th, I posted a little message asking for assistance with finding models for my characters.  I described my characters:  Stefan, whom his countrymen (countrywomen?) think is the epitome of "tall, dark and handsome" and Kelly, pretty, but not model material, dark hair and eyes, looking enough like my model for Aloriah (which, for those of you who haven't figured out how to pronounce that, it's "Al-Oh-Ree-Ah" said fairly quickly) to allow us to really believe we are looking at Ree's mother.

I have never had the Universe slap me silly within 24 hours for asking for such a thing.

I monitor modeling pages on Facebook on the off chance that one of the dozen or so sites might post someone I can see as a character.  (For instance, if I hadn't already seen Teo Theodoridis before liking those pages, I would have found my Kyle there, as he has been featured a couple of times.  There have also been a few alternates for Teresanna, Ree and a couple of the other "background characters" on those sites.  Never have I had all the modeling sites post the same model at the same time.

Until June 7th.

ALL the sites that feature male models posted photographs of Daniel Sobieray on June 7th.  Several of my friends who also like those pages hit me in private messages with photographs of Daniel Sobieray from those same sites.  Several other friends who DON"T like those pages on Facebook sent me private messages with photographs of Daniel Sobieray.

I looked the man up.  On his own Facebook page within the first few posts, I found about a half a dozen photos that made the Stefan in my head poke me - hard - and say "Yes, that could have been me posing."

So what is a poor writer, looking at a news feed that has become a temple to a Los Angeles model to do?

Yes, you guessed it.  While I was right on Daniel's Facebook page, I liked his page and dropped him a message, basically introducing myself, telling the little story I've just shared with you, and the result.  As with my past models, I asked his permission to use his photographs to represent Stefan with my standard "creative borrowing set up" - that any photos used with have the source included, and he would be identified as the model, making it very easy for anyone who liked him as this character to locate more photos, possibly leading to more jobs......

Yup.  Standard approach.  Sometimes I get shot down when I approach the models like a stalker crawling out of a sewer, but sometimes, as with this time, I get a very lovely response thanking me for compliments I've included in my intro and I get permission to use the model as my character.

So the next step is always putting the name in Google to see what comes up for photos that strike me as the character.  As the kids these days put it:  O M G!

The first couple of pages I visited were like when I stumbled across Dylan Griner when looking for a model for Chase Benton.  In particular, there was this photo that made my chin hit the floor - almost literally.

The Stefan in my head keeps telling me that he started doing cocaine when his agent started harping on him about starting to "look fat".  As I looked at this photo, personally admiring the view, Stefan's agent/manager, Christof, started yelling in the back of my head "Look at those love handles you're showing!  You're getting fat and lazy!  How can I sell your photographs when you're fat, wrinkled, and starting to show grey hair?  You need to keep your weight under control for the good of your career!"

The hanging head and general feel of this photo just really got to me - especially when another photo right after it was either photoshopped or just shows enough of a different angle to make Daniel look much leaner, but no less defined.....

Of course, one of the pages I visited listed some stats, and that was when the theme from The Twilight Zone REALLY started to play.

You see, I've described Kyle Benton as 6'2", muscular, green eyes, dark hair.  The stats on Teo Theodoridis match that description exactly.

I've described Chase Benton as almost the exact duplicate of his father, but he also takes after his mother a little.  The stats on Dylan Griner put him at 5"11" or 6', depending on which site you look at, and he otherwise matches the description.

I hadn't really thought about how tall Stefan might be, but the description I gave above - and the fact that Kelly is about 5'6" and, in a couple of scenes I've been shown, Stefan is a bit taller than Kelly.  She actually makes a comment to that effect, as her husband was about her same height, so she was never able to wear heels when they were going somewhere special.  (Being 5'8" myself, this happened a lot before I went to college, as most of the guys I went to school with prior to that were mostly my height or shorter.)

Daniel is either 6'2" or 6'3", depending on which site you look at.

So, basically,, if I were to get my three chosen male models together with the two ladies I have for my characters (I'm still looking for Kelly), the men would tower over the ladies in the same way that the characters do.

Sometimes, the Universe is a little disturbing when giving me what I ask for......

I Am Woman, Hear Me Brew......

There was a big news story over the weekend here where I live in Maine about women in "non-traditional" positions, in this particular case, covering some ladies who work in a local brewery.  The news made this sound like it's such a strange thing for women to be doing, but it got me thinking after they'd finished the broadcast and I was moving on to other things....

Are we still that far in the dark ages, when females cooking up batches of beer is considered so far out in left field they need to do a long exposition on the news to point that out?

Sorry....maybe it's just the way I was brought up.

My mother was raised on a farm, and the traditional thing about farm families was that, between diseases, accidents and other such things that would prevent children from surviving to adulthood, there were always as many children as the parents could produce.  Just as an example was my grandmother's family, with 16 children, in which all the boys went out every morning to work out in the fields and all the girls were charged with cleaning the house, cooking the food, making the clothes that the family would need, etc.  One of my mom's aunts, thinking she didn't have much time left on this earth when she was approaching her 96th birthday, wrote her memoirs, which included talking about evenings on the farm, when all the girls would gather in front of the fire (as this was prior to electricity being a common thing, so it was the way for them to see what they were doing) to knit underwear and socks while the boys tried to put together the things they would need to play whatever game they may have created while out cutting hay or hoeing the garden.

These were the traditional roles that my grandparents were raised with, and the roles that they brought up their children with, for the most part....

Except there was a minor kibosh for my mom and her siblings:  There were no men to go work in the fields with the exception of Pepere, as there were four girls.  When faced with having to do all the "manly chores" by himself or use the daughters he'd been given, Pepere broke with tradition and brought his girls out into the fields.  When grandchildren started to arrive, some male and some female, the grandchildren were told about the "traditional" roles, with the girls being shown knitting, crochet, embroidery, etc. and the boys being sent out to the field, but there was also a lot of non-traditional time.  My sisters and female cousins were just as apt to be out in the barn, shoveling manure, feeding the cows, milking.  The boys all learned how to do simple clothing repairs.

By the time I was having children, the world had shifted.  Women no longer stayed at home to take care of the children because men could no longer make enough of a paycheck to cover all the bills without assistance.  My mother's words from my high school years, which she was never allowed to experience because, back when she was graduating from 6th grade, the higher grades had a tuition that your parents paid, just like going to a university now, and my grandmother saw no reason for a woman to have a high school education in order to cook, clean and change diapers.  I went out and took whatever job anyone was willing to pay me to do (within reason, as I was taught that a woman who has any other means of providing for herself should NEVER stoop to selling her body).  I've held several "traditional male" positions in my life, so the news story about women in the brewery threw me for a loop.

It never even crossed my mind that, in this day and age, there was still such a major deal about "tradition".

So, this sheds new light on recent stories about people dying under a hail of stones in the Middle East.  It sheds new light on the attitudes I've run into with the current batch of political leaders who are trying to get elected into various offices this year.  It especially makes me rethink a couple of things that I was mulling over pertaining to the current "work in progress" as well as the historical romance and the sci-fi that are waiting in the wings.

Tradition isn't always as dead as I might think it is.  There may be chivalry still out there in the world, people raised in tradition the same way I was raised non-traditional, and some of these values may come into play when a non-traditional woman finds herself alone in a very traditional country where she's considered a second class citizen.....

We Didn't Start The Fire.......

I've turned off the news again today.

It's the same stories repeated over and over, each time with a little bit more added on to try to keep you interested in this newest development, and most of the "new developments" are from a single person's point of view, meant to cause hate and discontent.  Having spent a lot of time over the past couple of decades looking into our nation's history, I have a hard time with current news thinking this is all brand new and we should be getting all hyped up over such as this:

Obama bypassed Congress recently to gain the release of a prisoner of war.  Oh gee!  In today's theory that we should impeach the man for this, what would today's press have done with Franklin Delano Roosevelt?

(Check out this news story from January:  Presidents who've bypassed congress)

Looks to me like someone who was calling for impeachment a couple of days ago needs to read their US History.

I'm also seeing a bunch of stories about kidnapping victims, like the trio from Ohio, who are being found after decades of imprisonment and abuse.  Now, I live in a very small town with over an acre of property, and if I'm out working on my garden with a radio running a couple of feet away, I have a neighbor who will send the police over to ask me to "turn down the music" that I can't even hear if a car is going by.  I've walked officers through my entire home, including down into my basement, to prove that the barking dog they've been sent to investigate DOESN'T belong to me.  Yet, in Ohio, reports of women screaming didn't even get a police drive by or, if the police DID respond, didn't evoke a complete walk-through in order to prove that there were no women, ANYWHERE in the house, who might be getting raped and tortured?

Looks to me that the person who did the kidnapping isn't the only one who kept these kidnapping victims imprisoned when, even in the Jaycee Dugard story, they didn't take a walk through the back yard "compound" of a man who was a known sexual offender just on the off chance that one of those sheds he had in his back yard - which neighbors had reported CONSTANTLY as hearing suspicious noises from - to see if maybe this sick little monkey and his equally sick wife might possibly have someone back there they were torturing.

And of course, all the posts about prices going up and who we should be blaming for it.

Um, people??  Who was it that changed the laws so that the police can't go into homes without six tons of paperwork being done first or the owner's permission?  Who is it that takes money from oil company lobbyists and looks the other way when the oil companies put the cost of oil and gas up?  Who is too busy arguing "across the aisles" instead of using a little common sense that says that, if we ignore intelligence saying that we're about to be attacked, we should DO SOMETHING to prevent that attack?

That would be the liars and thieves that have been put into political office because you weren't paying proper attention and started to allow lobbyists to fund political parties.

In the past in America's history, who had the most money to put into the hands of the politicians to have laws changed to protect "personal property" (including public domain) so that we now need to protect the privacy rights of people like Ariel Castro and Philip Garrido?  Um, yeah.  That would have been those like Al Capone and other Mafia bosses when the police were able to gain warrants too easily, cutting into the profits of the cartel big-wigs.  Instead of now being allowed to use some common sense, such as hearing a baby cry when there isn't supposed to be a baby on the property and investigating to make sure all is well, the police have to go through ten tons of red tape, and by the time they get done with all the tape, decades have passed and a young girl who disappeared on her way to school has two children older than she was when she was abducted; or there's a dead mother and children who were gunned down by the man they had a restraining order against because his privacy was more important than the rights of his wife and children to be assured by his parole officer that he didn't get his hands on a gun; or there's some idiot who should have never been allowed to carry a gun in the first place gunning down young men in hoodies under the pretense of being a "neighborhood watch captain" who is protected by one of those laws that some politician put into place because someone paid the right amount of cash into a political campaign.

When we want to fuss and fight over our current state of affairs, how about look back at the way things were when white man first started to appear on this continent in the big boats from away?  Our forefathers had been subjected to unequal laws that protected the rich and constantly put the poor man at the fuzzy end of the lolly pop.  The initial group of rules they established, including the separation of church and state, were designed to change that, beginning with these words:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."  (taken from http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html)


There was also a Declaration of Independence - which we used to learn in school, but I'm not sure that they still fully teach - which begins:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness  (taken from: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html)

So, if you ask me, what we have here in the United States is a government that has gone to the kind of government our forefathers hopped onto big ships to escape.  What the politicians who refuse to raise the nationwide minimum wage while giving themselves yet another "cost of living" wage because they can't afford the yacht to go with their mansion any more won't remind you of is the people who came here with little but the clothes on their backs, subjecting their families to hostile natives who didn't like white men invading their country, bringing diseases they'd never heard of and had no immunity against, who were just as apt to kill you as look at you.

Our politicians and law makers USED to be common folk like us, who didn't make any more from their time in office as I might make working up the street in the local general store, and they sure as heck didn't get a "forever wage" for serving for a very short time.  We all remembered that these people were regular joes, who were hired to run the country for a short time, then they went back to their regular jobs and were rarely heard from again.  They used to consider what the lobbyists, Wall Street types, etc are doing as bribes, and laws weren't made on the merits of a bribe.

Before there were bribes running this country, common sense ruled more.

You didn't see the President going through Congress and being blamed for their dragging their feet (Bengazi) who decided to ignore Congress to try something on his own to gain the release of an American who had already caused several deaths and avoid further deaths.

You didn't see the rights of a sexual offender protected over the rights of the little girl he kidnapped and tortured for almost two decades.

There were mistakes, sure enough, but they weren't taken by the media and beaten well beyond the point that the "horse" had died and should have been buried.  We had the common sense to tell our media to SHUT THE F*&% UP and DROP IT!  We had the common sense to stop, investigate on our own, and realize that things aren't always like what we're seeing on television, and that we shouldn't let one media mogul's private agenda skew our view of the world and what we need to do to make it a better place.

Thank you for reading through my rant and for adding any thoughts, whether you agree with me, disagree, or have an entirely new take on something I  mentioned or neglected to mention that I may not have thought of yet.

Thank you, especially, for putting this blog at over 1100 views in less than a year.