New App Discovery

I was scrolling through Facebook when I saw a link to a website that let you listen to radio stations around the world. Any of them. It didn't matter if they were in the US, Canada, France, Japan, Peru, or New Zealand.

Of course, I headed over to check it out because is there anything more intriguing than media from other countries? Although, I did start by scrolling up to Minnesota--my former home--and checking in on some local stations first.

Then I went international.

I started with Canada, started scrolling toward Europe before quickly reversing and heading for Australia.

And I found my new favorite radio station. :-)

First, let me say that I don't like my radio options in Atlanta. There's one station that's okay, but it's way outside of the city and I lose it pretty quickly. Also too much time spent talking or doing ads.

Second, this radio station website has an app. It's called Radio Garden. So now I have a radio on my iPhone. (Sorry, I didn't save the link to the website, but if you want to check it out, I'm sure you can find it by searching online for Radio Garden.)

Third, the screen in my car went blank, so I don't even have a radio in my car right now. Also, while I'm working, I can listen at my desk. In a building where a radio signal would have a hard time penetrating.

And yes, I can stream because of Amazon Prime, but then I have to make decisions. Tuning into a radio station means someone else is choosing and I'm okay with that. If I want to listen to a particular song, then I can go to a streaming app, but for casual listening, this is perfect for me.

So what radio station did I find?

It's in Sydney, Australia and it's called iHeart Radio Australia - The 80s. Yes, all 80s music all the time, and unlike the 80s station we used to have in Minneapolis once upon a time, this station doesn't play the same 100 songs over and over. So far, I've only heard 2 songs more than once and they've played music I don't remember, so not stuff that got heavy airplay.

Even better? The station has no commercials! 

Yes! Commercial free, all 80s, all the time. Does it get any better than this?

The app is free. There are pop up ads, but they're visual and don't interrupt the music, so I can live with them.

I received no compensation of any kind for this blog post. I just love having music from around the world available to me and thought I'd share. Also 80s without commercials. :-)

Grumpy Patti Says No

There are a couple of things I've been noticing on websites lately that are really aggravating. Both involve pop overs that cover a good portion of the screen. I hate both of these things with the fire of a thousand suns.

The first one I started noticing is confined to my tablet. Every time (at least it seems like every time) I click through on a link to read some article, I'll get a box that covers the top half of the window inviting me to download their free app. No! First of all, I don't want 9000 apps on my iPad. Secondly, I might never read an article on that site ever again. Stop bugging me.

Besides, even if it's a website that I visit often, I usually don't want the app. I always forget I have the app anyway, so it's just a waste of time and space.

The second one happens no matter what type of device I'm reading on and this pop over window is even bigger and more annoying than the "download our app" messages. I've been seeing it on marketing websites in particular (you'd think they'd know better) and a growing number of author sites. It's a sure way for me to close the browser tab and vow never to visit that site again. What is it? The box invites me to subscribe to their newsletter.

No, a thousand times no!

If the material on your site is something that impresses me, I can find your subscribe form on my own. I don't need an obtrusive window squarely in the middle of my screen, covering up pretty much every word of content. It's especially annoying when I haven't even read a sentence yet and have no idea if your content is even worth my time let alone enough to entice me to subscribe to your newsletter.

It's making Patti one grumpy author, so for crying out loud, quit it already.

Hiccup Cures

A while back, I got the hiccups and did an online search for a cure. I found one that worked immediately, but didn't bookmark the site because, hey, I won't forget something this easy. (Yeah, right.) And even if I do forget, I can just do another online search and find it again. (Theoretically, this is true.)

So I got the hiccups a few minutes ago and (of course) I couldn't remember the easy no-fail cure. I also forgot exactly what search term I used originally to search the net because what I got this time as the top result was not very helpful.

The top result had several suggestions. One was to stick out my tongue. That did not work. Another option was a rectal massage. Um, time to check out the second search result.

Site number two also suggested sticking out my tongue. Strike one. Plug my ears and drink water through a straw. I guessed I could do that, but by the time I got to the kitchen and got a glass and a straw and filled it with water, the hiccups would probably end on their own. Strike two. And then I saw one that would be quick and easy to try--Hold my breath.

It worked! I held my breath until it became uncomfortable and when I released it, hiccups were gone. I'm not sure this is the cure I found the last time, but it worked so I don't care.

Random

I couldn't come up with a topic to blog about and so I thought, hey, I'll do a random website generator and blog about whatever turns up. The first site I ended up on sold sex toys. I decided to try again. The second attempt was a bit more conducive to blogging.

Site two was Dubtown Urban Exploring. The site is in German, and while I did take that language in high school and college, I've lost a lot of my skills, so I had to rely on Google translator. Not the most accurate thing ever, but enough so that I could understand what I was looking at. This site has some hugely interesting photos of abandoned buildings. One of them is a sanatorium that was built in 1899 and its in great disrepair. It's also hugely fascinating to me.

A lot of my stories take place in derelict buildings and warehouses. The images are wonderful for getting the imagination firing. I've also spent the past couple of days thinking about a story that I'd planned to work on months ago, but got sidetracked by other things. This site will definitely be perfect for inspiration on that front, too.

The other thing that struck me is that it would be pretty cool to take a camera and go out exploring like this person did. It just shows that anything can be art. I've bookmarked the site to return to in the future.

Adjustments

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about searching for royalty-free photos online and what an ordeal it was. I had a few people ask me why I was taking the time to look. Now that things are in place, I can answer this question. If you've visited my website previously, you would have noted that the anchor image was the running couple from my Crimson Veil book. They've been replaced.

Check out my website's home page to see the new couple!

The new picture fits in so seamlessly, it looks as if was always there, doesn't it?

Even though it took forever to do the image search and even though I didn't find another running couple (who weren't smiling), I think the new image works really well. I like that they're holding hands and that the woman is in front. To me, it looks like they're partners and I usually write heroes and heroines who work together as a team. They're even wearing dark clothes.

In other news, I'm working on edits for Shadow's Caress, my Feb 2011 release from Nocturne Bites. It looks as if the title is set now and I'm relieved that I don't have to brainstorm more ideas. Titles are really hard for me, and for some bizarre reason, I've been able to keep about half of the ones I've come up with. Go figure.

Website Is Back

It took 2 days, but my website is back online! If you go visit www.pattioshea.com, let me know if anything looks wrong or broken. Thanks!

I've Redecorated!

My newly redesigned website is live! I think it turned out great, so please come over and take a look around. www.pattioshea.com

Confession time--it's been really tough for me to give up control of my site. I didn't think I'd have a problem, or at least not too much of one, but I am. Maybe because it's been 7 years of being completely my baby. As soon as I sold my first book, I signed up for HTML classes, learned CSS (another web program), and worked to pick up other skills as I went along. But I knew it was time to stand back. I'd exhausted my meager skills as a web person and I needed someone who was beyond what I was capable of creating. Time is also a factor--I just don't have enough of it any more to keep up with the site. This is where the real letting go is going to be tough--not doing my own updates any longer. Ouch! I'm sure once I get over the emotional issues of letting go, I'll be fine and the site is beautiful!

It's not completely done yet. I'm going to add an actual blog there. I'm still going to keep my Blogger and MySpace pages, too, but I'll be mirroring the posts rather than posting live. I'm excited about this because it was something I wanted to do from the start, but 4 years ago when I started blogging, I didn't know how to put it on my site and so I just went over to Blogspot because it was easier. I added MySpace when I joined, but having the blog on my site will give visitors one-stop shopping. :-)

The other news is that my Blogger page will be getting redone to match my cool new website! Yea! It's time for a new look there, too. No changes on MySpace, but I already have a cool look there.

So come on over to my newly redecorated home, take a look around, have a cocktail. :-) We'll consider this a cyberspace open house.

Christmas Websites

Since it's the weekend before Christmas, I thought I'd go in search of some cool sites for the holiday. I found a few.

North Pole.com is broken into three sections: Kids, Parents, and Teachers. There's a list of free things to do here, including sending a letter to Santa, a visit to Elf Pal Academy, puzzles and activities, and stories to read and color. There's also a section for Christmas recipes and you do not want to miss the disco-dancing Santa Claus.

Next up is The Official Website of Santa Claus. Here you can send a letter to Santa, find out about traditions around the world, and read about the physics of Santa.

Santa's Net also has a section of world traditions, song lyrics for some holiday favorites, and a naughty or nice list checker. Where do you fall? Also another opportunity to email Santa.

Find more recipes at Christmas-Cookies.com. The count is 540+ recipes and people can leave comments. Also has low carb cookies, country of origin listings, and baking tips. For those of us who um, nearly set fire to microwave popcorn, ahem, this last part might come in handy.

Merry-Christmas.com has games like elf tic-tac-toe, boxing with Santa, and a few trivia games. See how much you know about It's a Wonderful Life. There's also a section for kids where they can email Santa, find coloring pages--both for online and off, and download free MP3 music. This site also has a section on traditions and another for recipes. And if you're looking for gift tags, you can print some out here for free.

I've only browsed through these sites briefly, so as always, use caution on the net, but they looked okay in the time I spent there. Enjoy!

Random, Totally Random

I needed a blog topic for tonight and was getting desperate. I searched news headlines for articles I could maybe talk about about, but nothing grabbed me. Then I thought, well, maybe I'll head over to Google and search for someone who has suggestions about interesting blog topics. That was no help. My next idea was to use the "I feel Lucky" button on Google. For some reason, I thought it would take me to a random website, but unfortunately that isn't what it does. It takes you to the first website listed in your search results. Pfft. That wasn't what I was looking for.

Then I googled "random website" and lo and behold, there are sites out there that do just that--take one to a random website. The first one I found is called Random Website Dot Com and the other was Memory Cloud/Random Website Generator.

In my exploration for a topic, I was taken to a website with wallpapers--some cool ones, an animal rights group website, zombie nation, and project censored, the news that didn't make the news. Some of these were meh, and others were interesting and I've bookmarked them to explore later. But while I did find some cool stuff, I still had no blog topic. :-(

Then I was taken to the Inspirational Quotes website. Now this is something I can go with. I love inspirational quotes. So my quote of the day is:

If you have built castles in the air,
your work need not be lost;
that is where they should be.
Now put the foundations under them.

~Henry David Thoreau

Is that cool or what? To me, what he's saying is that the dreamer should do more than merely dream. He's saying that the dreamer should do the work necessary to make his/her dreams come true. I totally believe that. I can't imagine looking back and having regrets.

Now granted, some dreams are impossible, but I'm not talking about things like becoming an Olympic gymnast or something that would bankrupt a Rockefeller. I'm talking about pursuing reasonably achievable dreams. Like writing. Go for it!

The Blog Where Patti Rants

First, I updated my website today and added a new Extras page. This is a work in progress, but so far I have a glossary for the Light Warriors series, a list of the theme songs for all my books, and the videos are grouped together. I used bookmarks so it's easy to access the information you're interested in seeing.

Now, beware, I'm about to rant.

Today, I received an email from an author I have never heard of before in my life. I most definitely never signed up for her newsletter nor did I enter any contest she might have been running because I don't enter contests from other authors. I figure they'd rather have a reader win than another writer and I do them the courtesy of not throwing my name in the pool. Yet for some unknown reason, this woman thought it was okay to just add me to her newsletter list. Grrr.

To say this irritated me is understating things. The only way people get on my newsletter is if they sign up for it, or they enter a contest where they are given fair warning that entering will put them on my newsletter mailings--and I haven't even held a contest in a couple of years. You'd think the law of karma would protect me, but I guess not.

Where do some people get their idea of proper online etiquette? Just because my email address is available on various loops (and this was the email address I use for loop email) does not mean that I'm fair game. If she harvested this address from any of the writing loops I'm on, she violated list rules on top of spamming, and given the genre of her book, I have a fair idea from which loop she might have gotten my name.

This author accomplished thing--she ticked me off. Big time. Enough that I will never buy a book from her. I don't appreciate spam whether it's for Viagra, penis enlargement, or an author.

Now extrapolate. She harvested my email address, so odds are good she harvested others--probably a lot of others--and they were spammed, too. Probably a lot of these people are as angry as I am about it. Does she really think she did herself a big favor by sending out this email to all of us?

Don't spam, people, it's not nice.

Books and Links

I heard some people already have their books to judge for the RITA Awards. I'm not one of them, but then I always seem to get my books later than most others. It's frustrating, though, because the more time I have to read, the easier it'll be to get them all in before the deadline. Sometimes judges really get slammed with a huge amount of entries. IIRC, I had eight last year. That's a lot of reading in a short time.

I was talking to a guy at work Friday about Linux and Ubuntu because I heard about this really small, light laptop that's incredibly cheap. The EEE from ASUS (you can read more about it here if you're interested), but it runs Linux and I've never used that before. So this guy at work is geekier with computers than I am and not only is he running it, he says his laptop boots up incredibly fast. Unlike with Windows where I can basically make coffee and still sit and wait. That speed makes it incredibly tempting. And this wouldn't be a substitute for the current laptop, but a traveling version. But since I still haven't made a decision on a new desktop computer after 2 years of consideration, I don't guess I'll be moving too fast on this.

Today is my local chapter meeting and I'm hoping to attend, but before I go, I found a fun web page. If you've owned a dog, you might find this amusing.

New Website!

It's official; the new website is up and functional! Yea! There's still some work to be done. One of the pages has an awkward layout and there's other little things that need tweaking, but the major work is done. :-) You can take a look at pattioshea.com and let me know what you think. If it totally sucks, I can reload the old site, but I'm really hoping it's okay and I'm totally excited to have something new.

New Year's Day was spent at the Evil Day Job (EDJ). Sigh. I can't believe they make us work on a holiday like this. There was one other person there yesterday since only my union lost this particular holiday--the other unions and management lost other holidays--and there are only like five of us from this union on the floor. It was nice and quiet and I was actually able to take my lunch hour without ear plugs. :-) Too bad I wasn't writing yet because it would have been perfect.

Today I begin the new book. I'm actually looking forward to getting started and I probably would have kicked off on Monday if I hadn't gotten bogged down in my brilliant idea to redesign the website. :-) No tweaking it for the rest of this week. I have to clean my house and write. The site can wait till Saturday evening or longer. Unless it sucks and I need to reload the old one, of course.

Didn't Make It

I fell short of having the new website ready to load. I have two more books to do pages for and some links to set up yet; I was this close. If only I didn't have to go to the Evil Day Job (EDJ) today and I could stay home and finish this morning, but I do, so that means needing to wrap up this website tonight. Tomorrow begins the onslaught of the New Book.

So speaking of books, how did the galleys go? I'm sure you're all wondering, right? I made 12 corrections. That's an incredibly small amount. The part that's scary is that 11 of those changes are to fix my stuff, only 1 change is for an extra word.

My mistakes include the point of view debacle where in the middle of my hero's POV, I have a paragraph from the heroine's POV. Why? Because during copy edits I needed to add the paragraph for explanation, thought I was in the heroine's head and didn't double check.

My other lulu of an error was having two full moons in approximately a two week period. I almost missed that, but as I made my last read through on Friday at the EDJ, I thought, "hmm, didn't I mention the full moon once before?" A quick little search of my WordPerfect document when I arrived home showed that sure enough, this was the second full moon in the book. I changed the first reference to starlight because I needed the moon more in the second scene later in the book.

Everything else was mostly nitpicky stuff.

Last Friday night, I go to make my final changes to the galley, and I decide I need to refresh my memory, so I look for the cover letter with the instructions on how they want the markups handled. Um, I couldn't find them. Anywhere. I think in my cleaning frenzy that I mistook the galley letter for the letter that came with the copy edits and shredded it thinking I was done with it. I was left with my memory of what I did the last time I had galleys for Tor. Hopefully, they didn't change their process.

Redesign Work

I'm behind everywhere--again. I have email to answer, comments to reply to, I didn't even blog over the weekend, but while I've been around, I've been busy. Friday night I decided to redo my website. Now is the perfect time since I don't have to start the new book until Jan 2nd (although I'd like to start tomorrow).

This wasn't quite a spur of the moment decision. I've been unhappy with my site for a while. I even picked out a web designer--finally--to do my site for me, but the waiting list is into 2009. I tried to be patient, but I couldn't do it, and I've been working on it all weekend. In between bouts of cleaning. I didn't get to start it until Saturday evening and then it was heavy graphics work. I'm not very good at graphics, so everything needs to be simple. And it was--except that I forgot how to do gradients, and when I found instructions, I wanted to groan at how easy it was. How did that slip through my memory?

I want to shoot for a January 1st unveiling, but I have a lot of pages left unfinished. As of last night, I still had most of my books to do. Because I'm using a style sheet, it's going faster than it would if I had to create each page, but all the text has to be redone. Not rewritten, but since I'm trying not to use any tables, it all has to be situated in a different way.

It's been time consuming and I'm supposed to be cleaning! I have company coming next weekend. I did get a fair amount done, but let's face it, a new website is much more interesting than household chores. :-) Although I'm pretty darn impressed when I walk into the office and see all that open desk space. It won't last.

Anyway, I'll make an announcement when the new site is up and running. ::fingers crossed:: Hopefully, on New Year's Day, but that means a lot of intensive work tonight.

How Did I Survive Dial Up?

As God as my witness, I'll never go back to dial up ever again! (To paraphrase Scarlett O'Hara.) OMG, I had to use dial up to test load times on various versions of my banner and it was absolutely excruciating. I love broadband and I can't believe it took me so long to get it. Of course, I still believe they charge way too much, but I think I'd beg on street corners before going backward.

Anyway, the original banner took 1 minute and 30 seconds to load. Absolutely unacceptable. I messed around with gifs and jpgs and compression until I came up with what's currently loaded. I lost quality--boo--but it's loading in about 30 seconds. Still too long, but much better than the original. I'll have to mess around again over the long weekend to see if I can trim the load time some more, but for the work week, I've done as much as I can do.

This, of course, took far too much time and I didn't finish until nearly 7pm. :-(

I volunteered to approve comments on the group blog that I'm a part of and I have to say that I absolutely can't believe the amount of spam that comes through. We've heard about car sales from Socrates and assorted other dead Greek and Roman guys. Fortunately, pretty much all of it ends up in the spam folder, but good grief. Do these people not have better things to do than build spam bots to go around touting used cars? None of it makes it through, so what's the point?

My red amaryllis is growing nicely. It's really actually kind of fun because they're coming up so fast, I can see the difference overnight. When I have flowers, I'll take pictures. Of course. :-)

Too Slow, Darn It

I redid the banner on my website this weekend. Unfortunately, I think it's loading far too slow for anyone on dial up. I'll have to double check that when I'm at my parents' house, but as I watch the way it loads on broadband, I can only fear the worst. I'll have to mess around with it some more and see if I can't make it smaller so that it doesn't take so long. I was too tired to do it last night.

While I was working on it Saturday night, I watched a really interesting show on the National Geographic Channel about the Galapagos Islands. They showed the different animals that call those islands/rocks home. And it made me feel hugely guilty for cheering for all the el ninos we've had. The poor seals (or were they sea lions?) and lizards who live there lost nearly 50% of their populations. Of course, the show ended with man messing up everything by coming in with their cruise ships and disturbing the creatures who call the area home.

The writing did not go well this weekend. Drat it all. The problems started with how late I slept on Saturday--I didn't get up until nearly 11:30. Not good. I dug out my extra winter blankets, washed them, got the bed all set up and had a bizarre dream on Saturday night. In it, someone was sitting on my lap while we rode in a car and I felt like I couldn't breathe. When I woke up, I realized it was probably the weight of all those blankets that triggered the dream. :-)

But back to writing. I think the problem is that I'm not 100% clear on what I want to accomplish in the scene. Oh, I have a general idea, but I think I need to sit down with my notepad and come up with a list of goals. I know how I want to end the chapter, so that's one plus. And I know some of the information I want to convey, but I'm stumbling around, trying to figure out how to get there. I guess I just need to sit down and write and worry about getting it right later.

Another plus, I might--maybe--have my heroine's name--still. I'm not ready to say it's for sure a done deal yet, not until I've written more in her POV than I have already, but I'm hopeful.

Color Coded Chaos

I was making all kinds of notes yesterday about the WIP. (I'm not calling it the book from hell any longer because that has negative connotations and I'm trying to think positively.) I like the legal pads, but with 8.5x11 paper. I used pink and lilac and I had a set that was supposed to be lilac, but it's grayer than my other lilac and I realized that I need more colors. :-) I have a list of things I need to go back and fix, a list of things I need to do yet in the story, and my list of chapter goals. I was also writing down a few other things that escape my mind right now, but I was thinking, wow, I wish I had more colors of paper. Do you realize how limited colored lined paper is? If I wanted paper without lines, the sky's the limit. With lines? Not so much.

I like the idea of color coding this way, but let's be honest here: I probably wouldn't remember what the color signified anyway and I'd have to glance over what I'd written. I really miss my memory. I think it was my second book that killed the most memory cells in my brain. :-/

Last night, after my brain had turned off for the day, I began working on my website. I want to load some of the pages for In the Midnight Hour on April 1. I need to find my contract and look up the word limit on excerpts. I can't remember what it is, but I think I'm over it at about 2000 words. That'll mean some surgical editing to bring the scene in within my contract's specifications. I also need my cover. Not just for my website either. I have other promo things that need it and are coming due. And I also worked on my trivia page for the book. TBH, with my thoughts centered on the WIP, I'm having a hard time remembering things to list on the page. I might end up with a really abbreviated version.

More Garage Door Adventures

Whew! I've finally fulfilled all my judging responsibilities and I can now return to writing on my lunch hour. I wasn't sure I was going to make the deadline without a huge push, but I have almost 2 weeks to spare.

I had more garage door adventures yesterday morning. I hit the button and the door went up 6, maybe 8 inches, and stopped. I put it down again, gave the spot that had stuck before a kick--hey! it worked last time--and tried to open the door again. Nope. This time, I frantically grabbed, lifted, and shook it in three spots before trying to open it again. It finally went up. My theory is ice locked up something, maybe the hinges. It's been warm the last couple of days and the snow has been melting and refreezing at night. Because I was trapped in the garage, I ran a couple of minutes late and because of that, I got stuck by the stupid train (you can substitute an expletive for stupid--I did) and because I got stuck by the train, I was late for work. Grrr.

I was actually able to painlessly move my newsletter from Yahoo Groups to the new service. Shocked me since Yahoo tends to make nothing simple, yet this was. It took less than five minutes. The thing that's interesting is in the one day since I switched over, I acquired more new subscribers than I did in a typical month with Yahoo. Either it's the new website format where people can just put in their email address and hit enter or Yahoo was a detriment for people. I wonder which it was.

Dealing With a Glamor Girl

There's nothing like starting out the day by oversleeping. I know I heard the alarm, but I must have hit the off button instead of the snooze. I woke up at 4:40 and had to run. Then, as if that wasn't enough, I go to the computer in my office while I'm waiting for coffee and a spider crawls down the center of my screen! Ugh! I hate spiders!

I looked around, found something to kill him with, and squished him--or I tried to anyway. I kind of missed and then I worried that he was on me, like maybe he got on my sleeve or something. I stand up and I'm shaking out my clothes, trying to find him. Then I slid the keyboard forward on the tray and there he was. He didn't stay there long. :-)

I think I would have been more panicked if I'd been awake, but I was still pretty groggy at that point. That spider was some weird color, though, and moving pretty sluggishly. I wonder what was up with that?

This--fortunately--is only the second spider I've had to kill in my house since I moved in. Or maybe the third. They've been few and far between, though, and that's a good thing. :-) The office is one of two rooms I haven't had a chance to finish unpacking yet, but now I want to. I'm sure if everything were put away, there'd be no spiders.

BTW, I did make it to work on time--barely--and now I'm counting the minutes till I can go home again.

Now that that's out of the way, I can talk about what I'd planned to blog on this morning. My heroine, Maia, is into clothes. Sigh. I should have had an inkling from the first scene I wrote, but I didn't figure it out that fast.

Despite what Stacy and Clinton say on What Not To Wear, I firmly believe that comfort is more important than style and I've been fortunate enough to have heroines who really didn't focus on their clothes. Until now.

Maia is one of those casually elegant women, someone who could put on shorts and a T-shirt and still look as if she could attend the opera. One of my cousins is like this. When I was in my early teens, I tried to emulate her, but unfortunately, I'm one of those people who can take forever getting dressed up for some fancy do and ten minutes later look as if I'm going to a baseball game. I've learned to accept this, it's just who I am, but now I need a crash course on clothes.

Last night, I went searching online for Maia's next outfit. I need pictures! Not just of the clothes, but of someone wearing the clothes, and that's where the difficulty comes in. A lot of the websites I visited--Land's End, LL Bean, Gap, Talbot, etc--show the clothes, but most of the pictures don't have anyone wearing them. Or if they showed a model wearing an outfit, I'd click on the picture to see the whole look in a bigger .jpg and it would zero in on only the shorts. I need to see the top with the shorts, darn it!

This story takes place during a hot, humid August time frame and that's also playing into the type of clothes. I figure dressy shorts and casual tops that still manage to look dressy on her. Maia would never wear the short-shorts that so many of the sites were showing, not in front of another person, and since Creed has invaded her home, that rules that style out. Maia prefers classic styles, timeless, nothing that's a fad or too trendy. She also isn't much for bright colors, she prefers neutral, earth tones. Sigh. I like bright, so I'd see something I'd like, but she'd be unenthused.

So does anyone have any good sites to see clothes? With women wearing them? I'm sure I'll be doing more searches for outfits as I move forward and I need resources.

Movie Review Sunday--Kind Of

Last night's movie was The Butterfly Effect. I'd love to give you a review, but unfortunately, I didn't make it through the movie. I found it confusing and disturbing and turned it off early. If it had only been confusing, I would have hung in there because it was confusing in an intriguing way, and I believe, that's what the director was shooting for--to have the audience wondering what was going on. However, I found aspects of this movie so incredibly disturbing to me personally, that I shut it off. I lasted until the little psycho kid was going to burn another kid's dog alive. On top of the other stuff that had already happened, that was too much for me.

However, I was intrigued enough to want to know what the heck was going on and I did a search online. I found a great Movie Spoiler Site and it explained everything that happened in a concise way.

Anyway, I found the premise for the movie intriguing from reading the spoiler, however, the execution didn't work for me. People who don't mind dark, grim and disturbing might like it, but I give it 1 star.

On a more fun note, I was reading Leiha's blog this morning and she had a link up to a cool Avatar Generator website, so of course, I had to create my own.

Notice the jacket and the hat--it's winter--and the laptop and coffee cup are perfect for writers. At least this writer. Caffeine is my friend and the laptop has become part of my body. :-) Leiha has more cool examples of avatars up on her blog for today.

Speaking of perfect for writers, a while back, Joely Sue blogged about a Demotivator poster that was absolutely spot on. Sorry, I'm too lazy to actually look up the post and link directly to it. :-) I finally went over to Despair.com and ordered it. Here's a link to the poster. For those of you feeling lazy like I do, it shows a Mayan temple (at least I believe it's Mayan) and it says in large letters: Sacrifice. Then below that, it says: "All we ask here is that you give us your heart." If that isn't the most perfect poster ever for a writer, I don't know what is.

The power went out at 4am this morning. I know because I sleep with an air cleaner on and the sudden silence woke me up. Of course, I didn't have a flashlight handy, but I figured I better call this in so that I can have power back by the time I wake up for real on Sunday morning. I managed to find a battery-powered mini lantern and I found the phone number for outages. A transformer was smoking, they said, and they'd have it fixed by 9am. I went back to sleep--tried to anyway--the air cleaner came back on at 5:15. Yea!

Made good progress on my edits yesterday and I'll finish the first run today. I'm fixing all the small stuff and tagging the stuff I need to think about or that will require time to work on. After I finish the first run, I'll hit these bigger items.