Tuesday, October 13, 2015

And now, a word from our sponsor....

I always loved that line in the old cartoons....

I've been re-editing "Night of the Tiger" and plan on calling it "Night of the Tiger: the Author's Cut". I finished a couple of days ago. Of course, we're also working on the covers at Northern Bard Publications, and the cover isn't quite ready yet due to a little miscommunication between myself and the photoshop artist...

Or so I thought, until she grudgingly showed me what she has so far (although the paint part isn't working quite as she wants), and we're doing well on it. Looking very nice so far, with the barn house against one of my photos of a mountain pass in autumn....

I think the Northern Bard Publications edition is going to be very nice indeed, and will be finished as soon as Dee Jae gets a run down street at dusk and gets the sign for BoxCars photoshopped in....

I really love working with creative types...

Monday, October 5, 2015

Loading my weapons.....mostly to see if my government is watching....*grin*

I should be old enough to know better, but I always make the mistake of going into my Facebook account right after seeing something on the news about yet ANOTHER shooting in America....and have to wade through all the posts by those who want to have our Constitution totally torn out of the laws and by-laws of our country as well as by those who insist that our forefathers put in the fact that we have the right to bear arms and that, by all that is holy, we will not give up that right.....

As the third child of four in my family, I have always been in the middle of arguments. I have learned that little trick of seeing both sides of an argument - and if it's a good sized crowd and I think I can get away with it, I'll argue BOTH sides...loudly...then leave when it starts getting into the time someone is going to throw a punch....

*missing my cousin, who was so like me that he joined in the fun...*

But to the current argument...

When our country was founded, one needed a gun to survive, and at one point, the governing country tried to remove the guns from this country and there was a rebellion. TAH DAH! New country under our own rules. The rules were written according to what out forefathers were coming here to get away from...

One of those rules was the 2nd Amendment, which states "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." (from https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/second_amendment

Simple enough, until we start letting the leaders we've put in charge keep changing things...

\Like closing mental institutions and turning the crazies out into the streets....

Then telling the law abiding citizens, some of whom hunt for meat for the family table, that they're going to (possibly) ban all guns, no matter what you might use it for, because the crazies are out there and, well, they can get guns! Guns kill people, not the crazies that are out there, unmedicated and with little voices inside their brains because the government closed the hospitals with the rubber rooms where we used to put the crazies...and if Johnny was in a rubber room on medication instead of skipping a medication that the doctor's told Johnny's mom he should take, but he doesn't want to take, and it's considered child abuse if she tries to make him.....

Of course, I could argue that, since we can't get unmedicated, crazy boy Johnny off the street, maybe we should ban guns....but.....

Let's just leave my little rant right there, shall we?

In the meantime, I won't be adding to the furor by naming any of the beasts who have chosen to pull a gun - or a knife, as recently happened in a town not far from here, where a woman got knifed to death by a total stranger over a look given in a parking lot of a grocery store - to end someone's life on a whim. I won't be adding to their insanity by making them more famous.

I joke that insanity doesn't run through my family, it walks through and gets to know each of us personally, but my family always taught me that human life is valuable. I've lost too many loved ones to want to give anyone else that pain for the sake of having my name put into some record somewhere as the person who blew a gasket and took some ungodly number of people along for the ride. I refuse to give the crazy ones who opt to do such a horrible thing more press.

In the meantime, the re-edit of "Night of the Tiger" is going very well, as I'm catching a few other things that were missed, whether by yours truly or the other editors, and keep finding myself spending more and more time there than reading the madness that my Facebook has currently become....

And the other characters from other unfinished tales that have been started are still waiting for me to finish this project and work on theirs....

And another of the Bentons is starting to whisper about her story....