Friday, November 27, 2009

Week 3

Hello everyone!

I wonder where the past week went. I was all set to stop being the beach bunny under her canvas tent and try to stick to home and get some work done. Managed on most fronts there, except on the work done part. In the blink of an eye, the days were gone and I hardly accomplished anything. Okay, you don't count edits as nothing - the galley for Storms in a Shot Glass came back and I also hit the first general issues edits on Walking on the Edge. Left to my previous work, I had to dredge up the mud of these stories' that had already settled into quietness. But the writer's mind is a remarkable thing - one or two prompts and you're right back to that world that you'd created a while ago, breathing in the scents, sights, and sounds of that universe, reuniting with those characters you thought you'd left to rest. And yeah too, getting back into the drama of it all! I don't think I've written a story with more drama than Storms in a Shot Glass! To think that there's just a little more than a month to go before these wacky characters are unleashed onto the world... Promo's slowly starting for this - catch the links in the Promo Maven section.

- Kid on the Block
...was left to his own devices this week. Found his creative spark - drew some really good stuff and even crafted a backstory to each drawing! Yeah, that's Mommy's boy all right! We may have hit on something there - I'll have more for you soon.

- Weepy Willow Woes
In the words of Willow:
Nolwynn took my memory out for a spin this week. Talk of nostalgia hitting hard - I was made to revisit haunts I had come up with seems like ages ago... Met people I became acquainted with so long ago and with whom I had virtually lost touch. What can you say - there is no Facebook for characters, is there?
Memories, memories... Now if only that girl would agree to look forward instead of back!

- WIPed out
If you count a contracted but as yet unreleased work still a WIP, then I'm totally wiped out! Worked on two sets of edits, and galley proofs have got to be the hardest thing ever! Talk of going over something for the hundredth time with a really fine-toothed comb, as it's the last chance for you to catch any issue before the copy goes to 'print'!
Add to it that you get first notes on another story - you haven't exactly gone wrong but there are avenues to make the ms better - sheer brain scramble. Still, I'm complaining but I'm glad I have it all (it was after all, Thanksgiving this week!). It means I've got work coming out and tell me if there is anything to beat that feeling!

- Back to the domestic goddess
The domestic non-goddess is making burgers tonight. That's one thing I never make wrong, and after the kids' being left to their own devices pretty much all week, can you say major Mommy guilt trip in under 2 seconds? I can, and trying to rectify it by getting to the blokes through the easiest route - that of their stomach!

- Hottie Alert
I may have been WIPed out this week, butt hat doesn't mean Willow isn't getting her case in and trying to make that chauvinist hero less of a chauvinist hero. I have a feeling she has a major crush on said hero, and when you know that he is supposed to look like the hottie featured down here, hmm, maybe you can understand where she's coming from!


Sam Worthington - latest Aussie hottie to hit the hottie radar! What is it with Australia? is it something in the water? Some magnetic field down under that gives totally gorgeous, yummy blokes on a regular basis? I first saw this guy on the Terminator Salvation poster. Who was he? Caught the movie, and as a recently-converted Terminator junkie, I was like, John Connor who? That's the impact of this guy, and now I'm really looking forward to Avatar. Yeah, he's young, in his early thirties, but man, do I (and many women too, lol) see the potential in that man! Already a great looking parcel, you can imagine him adding on a few years and some more experience on that face. And then, boom! Watch out!
Sam Worthington is the physical template of the hero of my current WIP - a hardened, street-savvy former boxing champion who's 'reformed' into a media station boss. And lol, I am definitely looking forward to writing that one!

- Promo Maven
Nolwynn Ardennes first interview as up this week at Love Romances and More blog. Check it out and read the very first excerpt of Storms in a Shot Glass!
Yesterday, I penned my monthly post at the Pop Culture Divas - Cop shows of old. Drop by and see which ones I watched when growing up.

That's it for me this week, folk!

Don't forget:

Live. Laugh. Love. XOXO

Friday, November 20, 2009

Week 2

Hey everyone!

Totally knackered week! I wonder where I'm pulling up energy to do something as simple as breathe! Advice: never try to combine exams, kids on vacation, a husband with a chronic need to be out (preferably at the beach) and a desire/need to work on your stories, all of this in the same week! I think I've zipped through the whole island in the past few days, and my mind simply cannot keep up!

Utter madness! Thank goodness the exam went well, for once they didn't pull stuff out of thin air to ask you about in the two-hour paper. On another note, might be getting into a mess with the uni - seems like registration for 2010 closed on october 16, before even the exams were written! Waiting to see if the other students pick up on this - get ready for some drama there!

What else has been up in the past 7 days? Check down and find out!

- Kid on the Block
Extreme. I think that's a word that applies inherently with little boys and growing boys and grown men too. Why else would you literally feel the adrenalin rush inside them when you're just standing by their side and they catch on to something really extreme and break-neck and totally can-kill-you-in-a-minute?
We were at the beach yesterday, me grilling like a dry lizard under the nonexistent shade of the canvas beach-tent and trying to work on the new phone (more on that down!), and here comes the whoops and shouts and hollers. Mom, you gotta see this (son); have you seen this? (stepson); babe check this out (hubby). I'm like, what on earth is this that's so important I see? So there I look up, and some bloke is doing flips and whatever other figures with a kitesurf right there in front of us. Totally swore he'd break his neck every time he hit the water (he did land on his feet though, meaning he was an experienced athlete), and shiver when this comes up:
Son: That is so cool! think I could do that later?
Stepson: You gotta learn how to swim first, silly!
But the worst:
Hubby, addressing himself to me: We should try to check later on if there's some yacht club or something that offers training for kitesurfing.
I'm like, are you mad? Insane? Out of your head? Kill me already, why don't you - the worry will do it if you let the kid attempt that.
But of course, I say nothing - what's the point really? Boys and men will do what they want to do, when they want to do it... Join me in praying the kiddo doesn't figure out you can do all those kitesurfing figures with a skateboard on a u-shaped ramp!
Haha moment - guess what he asked for Christmas...?

- WIPed out
In a total moment of madness (yeah, that's the theme of the week!), I started work on the outline of my upcoming WIP. Maybe I was prompted by Willow, who since a couple weeks has been pestering with ideas how to make the male chauvinist hero less of a male chauvinist hero. So I sat down and took a look at the outline, and rehauled some stuff around. My mentor always told me - use your cast. This is what I've done, and I may have figured out a way to involve the heroine's kids in the story without going all cliche. Wish me luck - this one is expected to go into writing in the coming week! I'll have the progress report here next Friday.

- Perception Tunnel
The eyes of a child versus the eye of a grown adult. This happened to me on Monday when we went out to the natural history museum (place that I visited as a kid at school some two decades ago) and then we hit the coast and the beach (yeah, I have beach blokes at home. I'm sure we could start investing in an SPF 50 lotion company. Sigh...). We went to check out some places along the west coast, and there's this beach that I remember going to, again some twenty years ago. Both places have changed - museum's been renovated and new rooms and species added over the years. Fine, I get that. But the beach, well, had a strange perception issue waiting for me. It too has changed, better accommodation and the likes when this was pretty much a 'wild' beach so long ago, but I clearly recall me and my cousins making sand castles near a huge limestone wall on the beach. I remember we sat there with sand rubbing into our shins, the wall next to us towered above us and when we turned and looked at the sea, it seemed miles away from us.
Well, guess what - the wall is like, barely 5 feet tall, and the sea, like 5 metres away too. Okay, sea levels went up and all that, could account for the sea not being miles away any longer, but the wall?
That's what made me realize - distance and perception are different for kids. And another feature of this distinction between the adult mind and the kiddie mind, is how your imagination steps in to 'fill' in those huge perception gaps when you're little. Thus, the 'big' wall becomes the facade of the fort keeping 'bad' things away while the princesses on the safe side got on with creating their perfect little world.
Maybe we need to start thinking like kids again...?

- Back to the domestic goddess
I have a recipe for you today! And yes, it is edible! Guess what happens when you got blokes at home? They're hungry, and that's like, all the time! Now, we don't exactly roll in the moolah so if you were to buy cakes and packaged stuff for them, you'd end up spending your whole paycheck at the grocery store and that too only in the cakes and sugary goodies' aisles. The solution? Bake your own stuff!
That's how I made muffins this week. One batch was chocolate chip muffins and the other was dried fruits muffins.

Here you go, it's as simple as pie (okay, pie ain't simple, agree with you!)

Ingredients:
2 cups (300g) self-raising flour
1/2 cup (100g) sugar
1 cup (250ml) milk
125 butter, melted
1 egg, beaten lightly
1/2 cup choc-chips/chopped dried fruit (I've tried dates and apricots)

Combine flour, sugar, chips/fruit in a bowl (can add a pinch of mixed spice or cinnamon powder when making the fruit ones).
Stir in milk, butter and egg.
As soon as it's mixed, stop and do not overmix (let it remain lumpy and coarse).
Divide into greased muffin pans, fill holes to 2/3rds.
Bake in moderate hot oven (200-210 C/400-425 F) for 15 mins or until tops are golden.

Recipe calls for three 12-hole small muffin pans. I don't have those and one batch such batter makes me 2 deep 6-hole muffin pans just perfectly.

- Reading Log
Went to the library on Monday, and got a whole batch of goodies waiting. Haven't had a minute to even glance at more than the back blurbs - will update this next week. I've got stuff like Husbands by Adele Parks, For Better For Worse by Carole Matthews, The Other Side of Midnight by Sidney Sheldon (finally got hold of that!! Yes Carole, you can jump around with joy!), Slow Burn by Julie Garwood, and a Regency Steepwood Scandals anthology.

On another note, made a slight dent in my to-be-watched pile of DVDs. I saw He's just not that into you the other night. Totally fell in love with the movie! I'd gotten it because of the hype there was at its release, what with the book and all that, but didn't think it'd surprise me so much. It reminded me a lot of Love Actually - these people who all know each other in some way or another and how they all find (or lose) love as they go about their lives. The acting was great and it had an edgy, real feel to it (Love Actually did have a romanticised Christmas aura to it). This movie was about real people battling real life issues, and I loved how it all worked out for each and every one of them. And yeah, the 'baddies' end up alone! Watch this movie if you're into romance and romantic comedy - it's well worth it!

- Style Dilemma
Okay, this one here is solved, but I had to share! Had been ogling a new phone for ages. Wanted one that would allow me to carry my ebooks everywhere (cannot bring a laptop to a beach canvas tent, can you?) and something that has a qwerty keypad to allow me to write if ever the fancy struck me while, say, in this same beach canvas tent (I swear that's become my second home!).

So my eye fell on the LG ks360. Looked like a real little gem, but that was the problem - too little. The screen in real life? Well if I might have needed progressive glasses for my eyesight-failing eyes in like 20 years, that phone would've made me need them in 2 years itself! Totally too small in real life. And it doesn't have Word on it! Eek!
Sigh... What to do? I needed a new phone!


For once a salesperson came to the rescue. Showed me the one they'd just received. Nokia E63. I'd heard of the eseries and knew they were great, but this one did not have the slide keyboard and wasn't visually as appealing (I'll stop whining soon!). So I bit the bullet and got this one, and boy, am I glad I did it. Just like with a man, it's not the apperance that counts, but what's inside and what he does and can do for you! Well my Nokia E63 is my new boy toy! Word is a dream to work on with this phone, and pdf ebooks too open perfectly well and just need you to scroll some to be able to catch the reading experience with a font that won't make you go blind in two days.
Only thing I'm not gonna do with it is get an Internet connection. I'd just turn into even more of a Facebook junkie and no one wants that to happen (certainly not my editor!).

- Hottie Alert
Sorry ladies, no one's caught my eye this week. But I'll be bringing the inspiration for my new hero next week, and he's definitely a hottie! Stay tuned!

- Promo Maven

Will be posting my monthly blog post at the PopCultureDivas next week! Catch me there http://www.popculturedivas.com/

And don't forget:

Live. Laugh. Love. XOXO

Friday, November 13, 2009

Week 1

Hey guys!

Today is Friday the 13th! And would you believe it? In the thick of summer, when we've been blazing like dry desert lizards in the scorching sun for the past week, today is rainy, windy, and cold. If I'm not mistaken, there's also some fog on the foresty, Forks town-like motorway that branches off our town. Talk of Nature getting in the element...

But for me, this week I'm facing another kind of gloom - revisions. And no, that's not book revisions (I wish... See how low I am?) but study revision. Have an exam on Monday (the last of the semester, thank goodness!) and it's driving me nuts. My hubby would say, when are you not nuts anyway, but he's not here and I am not gonna think of him impingin upon my groove!

So what else other madness is galore this week of Friday the thirteenth? Read on and you'll find out!

- Kid on the Block
Guys like to build. Ever wondered why on construction sites you find mostly men? I think it's got something to do with their need to be occupied, and also to show how good they are with their hands.
Kiddo is on summer break here, and in typical family tradition, we passed on a heirloom on this week. There's the great big Lego box that belonged to my brother and that was passed on to me when I was eight (read by that I wouldn't be tempted to just dump the tiny Lego parts into my toy cookery set. Sigh, I didn't burn stuff back then). So this Lego box gets passed on to my son now. Left him at my mom's on Tuesday, where the Lego treasure was unveiled, and three hours later, kiddo calls and goes, Mommy I made a monster truck with Lego and you gotta see it.
First of all, I have no idea how to make a monster truck. Second, I had no idea you could make monster trucks using said Lego pieces (all I made were tame little houses with the picket fence and big plastic tree in the yard). Third, there were wheels in that Lego set? My reply - cool, baby, all while I'm thinking, did my brain slow down somewhere in the past 2 decades or was it already slow in the first place...?
Men will be men - and that applies to six-year-old men-in-progress too. How on earth did he know he could make a monster truck with those pieces and how on earth did he even know how to build it? *shakes head* Uh, did someone say generation gap out there???

- Weepy Willow Woes
In the words of Willow:

What is it with that silly goose they've paired me with? I swear, that woman has no idea what time management means! Come on, I'm only asking for 2 or 3 uninterrupted hours of her time to put the story down. That ain't so hard to come by, innit? But no, she just keeps running all over the place, goin, yes Willow, soon. Well, how soon? I'm going nuts here trying to keep all the ideas in! And she's not even giving any chocolate around, going on her healthy summer living spree! Geez! What more do I need to yell in her crazy mind? Come on woman - I've got great ideas to help you make your male chauvinist hero into a... well, let's say less of a male chauvinist pig.
But does she listen? Noooooo!!!!



- Back to the domestic goddess
Burnt my finger when I was releasing the valve on my pressure cooker yesterday. So not gonna go into the recipe of the Beef Stroganov (that tasted good and didn't get burnt, thank God) because I absolutely abhorre the darn pressure cooker at the moment! Stupid contraption...
But next time I make it, you're on! It's becoming a staple around here, read that as - something she makes that doesn't either get burnt or turn out half-cooked that we can actually eat.

- Reading Log
For the first time ever in my life, I stopped reading a book mid-way because it was getting way too much for my nerves. Get this - Superromance; misfit couple; small town; lots of animals; single father with kids. Sounds like a pretty good deal, right? It was, for the first half. I literally drank the words in. But then the author hits the sagging middle, and you know she has to make her required Superromance word count. So there we go - a villain plops in from nowhere! And his motivation? Nada! He just wants to control because he can! I'm like, gimme a break! That sort of megalomaniac power-hungry overlord exists in sci-fi, paranormal, fantasy. Not in a a Superromance that takes place in a town of 123 people that no one has ever heard of! Totally threw me off, but still I read on, thinking maybe this is just a skid along the road. Two-thirds of the way in, the heroine's backstory conflict just pops out of the blue too, and there she goes - I love you but I cannot love you. Period. Nothing else, end of the discussion on her side. Hero goes - you'll be mine soon. And all I can think of is, why on earth does a guy like you want a woman who just had great sex with you but wants nothing more? She just told you your kids are good-for-nothings! That's supposed to be a hero??? Talk of awry GMC here! It all seemed to have been added in as an afterthought.

Picked up another from my TBR pile - a YA by Paullina Simons, Road to Paradise. Captivating and really flowing 1st person voice. Good plot too, about two girls going across the United States in their car. They pick up a hitchhiker along the way, despite their no hitchhiker rule, and there starts their trouble. Really intriguing story. The main character, Shelby, who's head we're in, is really well sketched and the author's voice flows really smoothly. I picked that one just to complete my pile last time I was at the library, didn't think I'd like it so much I'd get hooked on it. I mean come on - it may be YA, but it takes place in 1981. I wasn't even born then and 99 percent of the pop culture references in there was like, huh? I only knew the Bee Gees and Prince and Dynasty in that! Still, very good book - makes me eager to find more by the author.

- Style Dilemma
This one should be fun! You know how it's summer here? So that's the time of sandals and flip flops and yes, shoe shopping!! But, big dilemma. Just came across this totally gorgeous line and have no idea what to choose!


Ipanema Summer 2010 Collection, with some pieces designed by Gisele Bundchen in the GB Seeds collection. Had heard mostly of Ipanema's infamous bikinis before, didn't know they did such gorgeous sandals too. And to make matters even worse (or better, depends how you view it), they're an eco-friendly brand that use recycled material for their footwear and donate part of their sales proceeds on every pair of sandals to sustainable-environment organisations! I'm like, what's not to like here, eh? Now I'm spoilt for choice and can get only one pair (two if I sneak behind the hubby's back), but they're all gorgeous... How do I do this??? And what you see here is just liekthetip of the iceberg of that collection! Never saw such gorgeous colors on sandals!

- Hottie Alert
Just saw Star Trek over the past weekend, mostly as a prod from the hubby because I have never watched TV's Star Trek (not the original anyway. I did catch some of The New Generation with Patrick Stewart but that wasn't the 'real' Star Trek apparently!) So yes, I knew who Spock was, always thought he looked kinda weird, but Holy Cow - that was Zachary Quinto there! The world's sexiest psychopathic serial killer (I always thought Sylar was the best-looking on Heroes, and frankly, take him out and you get what? Boyish-faced Peter replicating everyone's power?)
So the hottie of the week is Zachary Quinto! Love those eyes, and that intensity... *puddle of goo*



- Promo Maven
No promo opp slotted this week because of the darn exams, but I should be back in the whilrwind next week.

Don't forget:

Live. Laugh. Love. XOXO

Monday, November 9, 2009

A word of intro...

Welcome everyone to my blog! I've dallied and twiddled with a lot of setups and formats to finally come to this one here and now. As a published author, I know I should blog, but how, where and what about? Questions that have plagued me throughout the past 4 years since I started writing.

So since everything's started to look like lists in my life, there came the brainwave - the blog too should be in list form. Came the next big question - what about? If you have a list, logically you have headings and subheadings in there to delineate your space. There came the answer I was looking for too - have a sort of headings setup that would provide the direction as to what I'd be blogging about (people who know me know I can shoot off tangents in the blink of an eye, so hopefully the setup will allow me to talk of relevant stuff and not bore everyone to death and back again!)

You may now be wondering - what on earth will she be talking about? I'll give you a roundup of the headings that form the highlights of my mad-to-the-point-of-Bedlam life and each week, I'll pick and choose the most relevant headings and elaborate upon them.

Here are the heading:

- Kid on the Block
I have a six-year-old son, and those of you with little kids know how much a kid on the block can create chaos and mayhem. When they've got an inquisitive mind like my son and their mouth spews nineteen to every dozen, believe me, that makes for quite some stories to tell! I'll have those here.
Now, ever wonder about the saying 'you cannot change a man'? I say we can, if we intervene when we're shaping him up. What better than a growing six-year-old then to gather and grasp how that complicated and twisted thing called the man's mind works? That too, I'll try to figure out here.

- Weepy Willow Woes
My muse, I swear, should be named Willow. She powers on all the time, depleting her reserves and thus looks like an anorexic waif (not to mention that she also doesn't eat when in the zone, where she is, uhm, three-quarters of the time...). But she is strong too, like the willow, she bends but she doesn't break. The woes however happen because while dear little Willow is powering on all the time, little ol' me has just about no time to indulge her and get down to write. Boy, this one should make for some terrific rants!

- WIPed out
The ever-present WIP. Who doesn't have one? I certainly do, and I manage to touch it so sporadically the poor thing gets literally wiped out in between rounds.
Catch my progress here (when I even manage some progress that isn't confined to my brain alone!) and uh, come hear me rant...?

- Perception Tunnel
Ever heard of tunnel vision? Well, that's not what I'll be touching upon here! This section is a more personal slant, one where some things I may have thought previously got challenged or how things change around us. Can get heavy, which I'll try to prevent, promise!

- Back to the domestic goddess
I debated whether to write Kitchen Nightmares here (complete with Gordon Ramsay rants and curses). I am what is generally termed a kitchen nightmare, as far away from domestic goddess as you can get.
However, I am trying to change that. Call it a resolution before the New Year or something, but recently scoring a new oven has made me want to whip out goody stuff from my kitchen. I'll keep you updated on the nightmare-to-goddess journey here, and will even post recipes of stuff I manage to make (uh, yes, that's edible stuff I'm talking about!)

- Reading Log
Every writer I know seems to also be a compulsive addicted reader. No different with me either. I'll try here to tell you what I'm reading and how it's striking me. If I find something great, I'll rave and scream it on all rooftops. But if it's not so great (read that as in it loses my interest completely, unfortunately happening very often lately), I'll rant and maybe even b*tch a little. But rest assured I won't rip or get real biatchy. That's not really me...

- Style Dilemma
And then too, on top of being wife, mom, author and all that lovely hoopla, I'm a woman too. As such, shopping (especially shoes and handbags) holds a very big part in helping me retain my sanity (for the sake of my husband, I had to develop the satisfaction of shopping from window shopping alone two-thirds of the time. We really cannot afford my inner shopaholic!). here you'll catch my latest style/shopping dilemma or anything that's stuck me in this area recently (come on, I gotta indulge myself too, innit?)

- Hottie Alert
Which leads us to this one - the current hottie I'm sighing after. Come on ladies, we need a break too, right? I'll even have pics here!

- Promo Maven
Oops, I forgot - a blog is also there to help an author promote her work! Here will be the up and coming spots where I'll be promoting my books.

So there you are! I hope this will be a fun and lively venture. My first elaborate rant--oops, post should be coming in a couple days!

Cheers n hugs

XOXO (I know, that's the Gossip Girl final line!)