Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 199

Adventures With Mother Nature

Friday night storms rolled through. It's been raining a lot in Minneapolis--thirteen of the first fifteen days in June had rain and it just hasn't stopped--but we haven't had much severe weather. Until Friday.

It wasn't only one storm either, but three of them converging on the Twin Cities one after another. One of the storms had tornadoes associated with it and it and another one had a history of dropping good-sized hail, some as big a tennis ball. I was not looking forward to having to t...

Please. Stop.

I love to shop online. It's quick, it's convenient, and whatever I buy comes straight to my house. It's nearly perfect.(Except more sites need to offer free shipping. I'm not paying more to ship something than the item costs.) In my internet shopping journey, I've signed up for newsletters and here is where my blog topic begins.

There are etailers out there who send me an email four or five days out of the week. It's ridiculous! These are not sites that tout their daily newsletter. I am...

Secrets

I've bemoaned my characters keeping secrets from me before and it happened again. This time my heroine was the culprit and she had two little bombshells for me.

With my heroes and heroines, I've gotten used to knowing something was in their backgrounds that impacted their lives, but not knowing exactly what it was. That I can work with. I can foreshadow as I write because I know it's there, I'm just in the dark as to what--precisely--the problem is. What I hate is when they don't give me a...

Looking At the Glass Half Full

I'm a glass half empty kind of person by and large. I blame my parents for this because they're glass-half-full people and someone had to point out the pitfalls. They would look at the ocean and say, "it's so pretty." And I'd mention, well, yeah, it's pretty, but remember there are sharks beneath the surface and rocks and don't forget there are storms. Someone had to remind them, right?

Sometimes, though, I need a reminder to see the good things and not only think about the half-empty part...

Windows 7 and Word 2010

It's a good thing yesterday wasn't a blogging day or y'all would have been subjected to another rant about authors who can't handle the simplest computer thing. Come on, people, you'd expect your surgeon to keep up with the tools of his trade and not use a scalpel if he could perform a laser surgery instead, right? So why don't you learn to use the tools that go with your job? Um, stopping here because this is becoming a rant already. Since I don't want to do this, I will review the elemen...

My Email Woes

Answering email has become a huge problem for me. I haven't been good about it in a while. Okay, a long while, but in the last six months it has gotten much, much worse.

What happened? I bought a new laptop.

Here's the thing. Windows 7 does not have Outlook Express (OE), which is what I've always used. Instead, it's Live Mail or something like that. So I decided that I'd use Outlook. I have Outlook 2003 at the Evil Day Job (EDJ) and it's fine. Some features I like better than OE, some f...

Parallel Worlds

I've been listening to audio books on my iPod at work. It's a great way to pass the day and recently I listened to a really awesome book. Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku.

This book is non-fiction and it's about physics. Yes, I am a total geek. Computers, physics, only moderately functional in social situations. Sigh. Anyway, the book talks about physics, but the really cool part of physics--black holes, wormholes, time travel, multi-dimensional space, string theory, and M theory. My eyes...

It Really Was Crap

So in the last Woot Off I managed to get through and buy a Bag of Crap. For those unfamiliar with Woot and their Woot Offs, every once in a while, Woot.com, which normally does one deal a day, runs item after item until they sell out. The highlight of the Woot Off, though, is the Bag of Crap (abbreviated as BoC). No one who's buying knows what they'll get in the BoC until it arrives, but sometimes it's awesome things like an XBox or a TV. The cost is $8.99 including the shipping.

I've "won...

Dropping the F Bomb

I've been thinking about the swearing my heroes do. My heroines, too, to some extent, but they never seem to sink into the depths of profanity that my guys do. When do I curb them or do I curb them at all?

No one's said anything to me, but the hero in the proposal I'm working on now goes farther down the road than any other hero I've had. It's not so much the frequency as his choice of words. I'm used to hearing the F bomb from my guys--they all use it, although in my first few books, I ce...

Which Casino Are You?

I'm posting a quiz today. Sorry for not having a new entry on the blog, but I spent all weekend revising the Work In Progress and I'm too brain fried to write anything longer than a couple of sentences. Back to normal on Tuesday night, I promise. :-)



You Are the Venetian




You are a true romantic, and you are enchanted with the idea of small European towns.

You live life at a slower pace than most people. You savor every moment.



You fall in love easily - whether it's with the same person or...