procrastination

aka cleaning your office, culling out unread books, sorting through borrowed books to give back, filing your reams of internet research on various topics, scheduling the next year's worth of www.pensfatales.com topics....

aka sprucing up your front yard, watering your apocalypse garden (i have zucchini! and the corn is sprouting or whatever you call what they do), spending quality time with your children (whether they want to or not), heading to the bookstore and buying books but not reading them because you can't until you write....

aka mulling over your plot, working through story lines, fretting over character motivation, pondering the potential settings of the next scene....

in other words...all of that aka stuff is productive, no question, but it isn't writing. Writing requires BICHOKTAM. Butt in chair, Hands on keyboard, Typing away madly.

No magic handshake, no muse on vacation, no excuse. Time to write.

gadgets, secrets, & spies, oh my

The CIA (umm, no not the Culinary Institute of America). The Central Intelligence Agency.




Their motto: We are the nations first line of defense. We accomplish what others cannot accomplish and go where others cannot go.

Everyone knows the headquarters are located in Virginia. An impenetrable fortress of security that only the ultra top secret clearance people can ever access. Unless of course you have the secret decoder ring (a.k.a. the Romance Writers of America, Kiss of Death chapter).



We visited the OHB (everything is DC is an acronym-it borders on absurd :) ) The Original Headquarters Building. I felt a little like Dorothy in Oz, wandering (escorted at all times mind you) through the halls of the CIA. It’s the kind of experience that is almost surreal. So fascinating and exciting and unbelievable that your mind is racing a thousand miles a minute. Unfortunately I can’t tell you about it because then they would have to kill you. (Kidding, sorry, couldn’t resist.)

They have a museum of gadgets, from the ultimate in high tech (at least for their time, their ultimate high tech gadgets are still classified) to the very low tech.

One of my personal favs was in the Cold War Gallery. The East Germans (pretty sure that’s the right country) would bump up against a person of interest and they would mark them with German Shepherd girl dog pheromones. (Later I read the Soviets would put it on the bottom of shoes.) Apparently boy German Shepherds can uber-track that scent for about four days. So once the pheromones were applied to the unsuspecting mark, then the boy dog traced the target’s movement seeing where they went, if they took the same route every day, etc. Very low tech but apparently very effective.

I'll leave you with this caveat. If you happen to see a very determined German Shepherd following you around you’d better be on your best behavior. :)

Lisa

ps. The CIA has a website:


Also, the secret decoder ring people website:

The Apocalypse

I've been remiss in my blogging duties. All I can say is it's been a heckuva month. End of school, parental visit, launching a grog, turned in a book, plotting another series...I've been *busy*.

My friend Martha believes in being prepared and her comments a few weeks ago totally spurred me to take action. I started my apocalypse garden. Prior to this awakening, I had a couple of tomato plants in a pot and some herbs by the back door (which if I don't say so myself, for a plant killer are looking pretty good) I've discovered a secret--fertilizing them regularly makes a really big difference. This isn't to say that I didn't fertilize before but clearly I didn't fertilize enough. Now look at these tomatoes!



So this past weekend we (and I use the term 'we' loosely, I picked the stuff out, figured the dimensions, and how to construct then left the actual construction to the husband) built a 3 x 3 planter box. Then today I forced, er, asked the kids to go with me to pick out food plants. We planted green beans, lemon cucumber, zucchini, cherry tomatoes (someone stuck those in the cart when I wasn't looking), green bell pepper, and cantaloupe. And look how great it looks.




Now I just have to convince the family that they will love eating everything in that box. And since I'm prepared for the Apocalypse, I can get back to writing...happy Summer!

Launching a Grog

So today we launch our grog: The Pens Fatales. http://www.pensfatales.com

This has been a labor of love from start to finish (yeah, cliche I know). We have had so much fun planning and discussing what we do and don't want, how we want to structure, and amazingly we have agreed on most things without much debate. We've found connections among group members that we had no idea existed three months ago.

When we started, we were eight writers in the romance and mystery genres with a common friend. With inspiration from Maya Banks (www.writemindedblog.com), we decided to make the leap.

Writing is so solitary. Even if you have critique groups and readers and chapters, in the end, the work is accomplished alone. So to have this more intimate outlet to develop friendships and forge connections that I believe will last a very long time, is a gift.

I consider myself very, very lucky. Happy Grog Launch to us!

food obsessions

why is it that diet change for the worse is easier than change for the better? i've decided its food chaos theory.

i'm trying to be healthier. of course, i hope this will lead to a loss of pounds as i really don't want to have to buy new clothes, but what i really want is to be healthy.

i've eliminated diet coke from my food choices. soda is bad for you, whether diet (aspartame--very bad chemical, my son will tell you it changes to a toxin when heated above 70 odd degrees) or regular (high fructose corn syrup is clearly from the devil according to every health advocate everywhere). but i like fizzy, so i now drink soda water.

there was an interesting study done recently about women and body image. the basic gist of the results that there was little correlation between how women felt about their body, what they were doing about it, and what was reality. many of the women were unhappy with their body image but unwilling to change their diet or their exercise habits. but the world doesn't work that way. you have to be committed to yourself. i think we try to change too much at once and then when we fail (eat whatever it is that we are trying to eliminate) we decided it's too hard and fall back into the easiness of chaos.

so, why obsession? i've figured out that i am not a moderation kinda girl. i either have it or i don't. i don't do well with the only one a week, because slowly that one a week turns into one a day and then one in the morning and one at night, and then what the hell, all day long....

so i'm trying to change...one food at a time. :)

Lisa

ps. one thing i don't like is that i used to take a break from working by going out to get a diet coke from the local fast food place...i miss that mini-break. i had a purpose but it was a quick jaunt and then i was back to work. somehow pouring a glass of tea from my fridge doesn't have the same feeling. oh, well....

one hundred days

So maybe you are familiar with 100 words for 100 days. This is a writing jump start tool that is supposed to motivate you to write every day...at least one hundred words (which truly is minimal) with the goal that you will begin a more steadfast and productive writing habit. A few years ago my critique group started this and I gamely went along with the idea. One rule: if you miss a day you have to start over.

So...I would enthusiastically jump right in and go gangbusters for...about five days. Then the kids would have a bunch of sports, or the dh and I would have a night out, or we'd have the kids' friends and parents over, or, or, or...and pretty much after the weekend, I'd have to start over. I probably attempted this for a month (maybe longer as I am stubborn) before I stopped writing altogether. The failure to keep at it past four or five days took an incredible toll on my psyche and that was it.

But of course because I am the type of person who REFUSES to give up, I would start the cycle all over again. And because I am also an occasional rule breaker, after failing again and again, I finally made up my own rules. I didn't have to start over. I just acknowledged the day off and kept my own tally of days.



I'm in my third year of going my own way and today I hit day one hundred for 2009.

not your everyday average vampire

I am not a huge vampire fan. Oh, I read Anne Rice and found those books to be riveting, ten, twelve, however many years ago but now for the most part, tormented immortal beings sucking blood, eh.

My daughter loves the Twilight series, loves, loves, loves them. To me, it’s the same old, same old (this is not to say I am not thrilled with Stephanie Meyer’s success...because hey, go Stephanie, it’s always great when a work inspires that many millions of people to read. :) )

But if I’m going to read vampires, I want the story to be extraordinary. Enter J.R. Ward and her Black Dagger Brotherhood series. Just finished Lover Avenged last Saturday, a treat because I’ve been writing like a fiend so I haven’t read anything for weeks.



Ward manages to craft a vampire series that is totally rockin’ by changing up the story. Vampires have their own society, their own governing system. They don’t prey on humans, don’t drink human blood (because...yuck!). The Brotherhood protects vampires and humans from the Lessers. This series is brilliant. Every single vampire has major trauma to overcome and their character arc is intense and fascinating. She manages to layer in multiple subplots, and although the main romance is wrapped up, she always has some unresolved complication for the reader to contemplate building anticipation for the next in the series. So that is me being analytical, now for the gushy reader stuff...the pace is unbelievably fast, the action brutal yet not gratuitous, the sexual tension is incredibly hot, and the story is over in a blink.

If you haven’t read this series, I suggest starting with the first Dark Lover. My favorite was the story of Butch and Marissa in Lover Revealed, but they are all excellent. And you can bet that I will be at the bookstore on the day the next Lover book is on sale....