Janette Rallison's Blog, page 21

Writer’s brain and my brush with the law

Last week my husband and I drove to another state to drop our daughter off at college. About halfway through the trip, we stopped at one of those gas station/convenience stores to use the bathroom.

This is how law abiding I am: the sign inside the store said, ‘restroom for customers only’ and because we hadn’t filled up with gas (My husband has his set gas stops and for some OCD-ish reason that I don’t understand, didn’t want to get gas there.) I decided I would buy something at the store. I walked around the store, two dollars in my hand, looking for something I wanted to purchase.

Here’s how a normal person’s brain would work during this transaction:

Find item I like.

Walk to the counter.

Buy item.

Walk outside.

My brain never seems to work that way.

Here was my brain: Candy bars are way too expensive. And they’re not good for you anyway. I’ll find something better. Oh, Oreos. I love Oreos. Six for .79? I wonder how many are in a regular package? No, Oreos aren’t healthy. I’ll go for the Fig Newtons. Fig Newtons taste like childhood. (Insert childhood memories which I will spare you from.)

As I pick up the Fig Newtons, I turn and see, mixed in with the Tylenol and Tums, a stack of pregnancy tests.

Who in the world buys a pregnancy test at a gas station in the middle of nowhere? I mean, if you’re doing things on your car trip that require you to buy a pregnancy test, maybe you need to pay more attention to the road. Just saying.

Then I walked toward the counter wondering if it would be tacky to take a picture of the shelf, and thinking of things I could say if I posted the picture on Facebook.

And I walked right out of the store without paying for my Fig Newtons.

A few steps out of the store, I looked down at my hands, saw my money, and realized what I had done.

To say that I was horrified, is not an exaggeration. I rushed back into the store, apologized, and paid.

And then my writer’s brain spent the next hour imagining all sorts of horrible things that could have happened if I’d totally spaced out and gotten in my car with stolen contraband Fig Newtons.

None of it was pretty.

Some of it may, however, end up in a future novel.

 

Cover reveal The Wrong Side of Magic

Now you only have to wait until Aug 23 2016 to read it. (But you should have two other books to read of mine before then. The Girl Who Heard Demons, and Slayers 3. How I Met Your Brother will be out Sept 2016. To be notified when a new book comes out, sign up for my newsletter–the green button to the right. I promise I won’t spam you. I’m too lazy to write spam newsletters.)

Fascinating Womanhood

Most of you are probably too young to remember the book Fascinating Womanhood. My generation talked about whether it had merit–and I will admit, often mocked it. My grandmother owned the book, and when she passed away and our family was going through her things, my mother asked me if I wanted it.

I remember reading passages of Fascinating Womanhood out loud to my husband. The two of us snickered over the advice. Because part of the advice seemed to be–and I’m paraphrasing from my clearly faulty memory–pretend that your husband is smarter/more competent/can do something better than you, so he knows that you need him. Men, the book assured us, needed to be needed. If they knew women could do everything on their own, men would feel emasculated. The book suggested that women pretend to be helpless every once in awhile. That’s how you became a fascinating woman.

The book also suggested that you choose cute nicknames for your husband to make him feel manly. The one I remembered is, “You Old Bear”. I have called my husband this off and on through our twenty nine years of marriage as a joke. Because, you know, we both know that we women of the modern generation don’t have to pretend helplessness to make our men feel secure in their manhood.

Fast forward twenty nine years: My laptop cord was dying so my husband just bought me a new laptop. (He was automatically assigned this task, because I know nothing about technology and he is an electrical engineer.) He patiently taught me how to use the features and transferred over my files.

The next day he asked me why I hadn’t used my new computer. I told him that I hadn’t been able to find the power button. (He never showed me where it was in his tutorial and all of my other power buttons have been in the top left hand corner of the keyboard. This one was hidden on the side of laptop.) He showed it to me.

The next day he asked me why I still hadn’t used my new laptop. I told him that since I’d written new pages on my old computer and didn’t know how to transfer the file to the new laptop, I had to keep using the old one until he transferred them over. Dutifully, he transferred over my new stuff.

Then I went with him on a business trip so I could write undisturbed in the hotel. He brought in a monitor from work so I wouldn’t hurt my neck looking down at my laptop while I wrote. I tried to use it, but when I plugged the cord into the monitor, it didn’t seem to work. I figured we’d bought the wrong cord for this monitor, because the little prong thingies (yes, that’s their technical name) didn’t seem to fit.

When my husband came back to the hotel room, I told him, “The cord didn’t work. Even after I plugged it in, the monitor screen stayed blank.”

He looked at me and said, “Please tell me that you turned the monitor on.”

Um, actually I had thought the monitor was already turned on. I mean, the one at home is always turned on. My husband hit the power button on the monitor and then the cord worked. My husband chuckled to himself about my lack of techno ability, but wisely didn’t say anything.

And that’s when I realized that despite my intentions to do otherwise, I had become a Fascinating Woman. I need my husband’s technology savvy on a weekly, if not daily basis.

I’m going to pretend that I believed the book all those years ago, and this helplessness of mine was totally planned–in fact calculated, to make him feel manly and help our marriage stay strong. Yep. So if your reading this dear, I have one thing to say to you, “You’ll always be my Old Bear.”

cover weigh in. How I Met Your Brother (plus a new cover to choose from)

(And by the way, weigh in on the title too. I love it, but maybe that’s just my twisted sense of humor and other people will roll their eyes.) Other options are: Mr. Right’s Brother, Relatively Flirting, and perhaps the greatest title of all time: A Romance Where the Brother Wins, So It’s Like While You Were Sleeping, But With Divorce Instead of a Coma.

cover weigh in. How I Met Your Brother

(And by the way, weigh in on the title too. I love it, but maybe that’s just my twisted sense of humor and other people will roll their eyes.) Other options are: Mr. Right’s Brother, Relatively Flirting, and perhaps the greatest title of all time: A Romance Where the Brother Wins, So It’s Like While You Were Sleeping, But With Divorce Instead of a Coma.

Why I’ll never run out of plot ideas (or at least embarrassing situations).

I’ve written a lot of books where I put heroines in embarrassing situations. After 25ish books, you’d think I would run out of ideas. But no. I never will, because I seem to go through life finding ways to embarrass myself.

Case in point, today’s airplane trip.

First of all, I’d like to say that I’m getting over a really bad cold. Most colds, you can take some medicine and just shoulder your way through them. But this cold kicked my butt. I was so tired, two nights last week, I slept for 12 hours straight. And I took naps. Ain’t nobody got time for that. (Not when I’m trying, I really am, to write Slayers 3.)

I’m finally feeling human again, but I had a flight on the schedule, and I know that one of the easiest places to pick up a cold is on an airplane.

I’m not usually a germaphobe, but today I was really paranoid. As the steward handed out peanuts and crackers, I realized that I’d touched the escalator banister, all those trays you put your stuff in, and the airplane seatbelt. How many other people with different strains of cold/flu had touched those things before me?

I couldn’t just eat crackers and peanuts with my unclean hands. I would have gotten up and washed my hands but I was sitting in the window seat and the trendy/cool guy who’d sat in the middle seat had put his earbuds in and shut his eyes. I didn’t think he was asleep. I mean, who can sleep on an airplane in the middle of the day in those uncomfortable seats, but I didn’t want to get up and disturb him just in case.

And I was too hungry to not eat the snacks.

So I figured I could just open the little packages and pour the peanuts and crackers into my mouth without touching them.

Sounds easy, right?

Yeah, the next time you take a flight, try it.

I’m pretty sure I looked like some sort of desperate snack whino with my head tilted back while I attempted to finger peanuts out of the package and into my mouth.

And the crackers—that was even better. While I was pouring them out, one went down my shirt. Have you ever had to feel around your shirt trying to find an errant cracker? I wouldn’t suggest this activity if you want to maintain your dignity.

And the cracker that accidentally landed on his lap—I didn’t touch it. I just figured he could wake up and wonder how it got there.

So yeah . . . not running out of awkward situations any time soon.

Son of War, Daughter of Chaos on sale for .99

Through Aug 2 (maybe Aug 3 if I forget to change the price)

But Grandma would be proud . . .

My grandmother was an immaculate housekeeper and gardener. She was so immaculate, in fact (I’m not making this up) when we came for visits to her house, we children had to stay in the basement for most of our visit so we didn’t mess up her stuff. Granted, it was a furnished basement with a kitchen, bathroom, and sitting room but for most of the years of my childhood there was no TV down there, which meant she expected us to do stuff like read.

Right now, you probably think this post is going to be about reading or being an immaculate housekeeper or gardener, but you’re wrong. This is a blog about monarch butterflies.

Grandma was also a big on nature, specifically bugs. (I’m not making this up: She loved praying mantises so much that she had several dead ones on her flower arrangements as decorations. At her funeral, she requested that one of the dead praying mantises be placed on the floral arrangements on her casket.) Grandma really liked monarch butterflies. So much so, that despite keeping an immaculate yard, she dedicated a portion of her garden at the side of her house to growing milkweeds. Yes, she cultivated milkweeds because monarchs lay their eggs on milkweeds. That’s about all the caterpillars will eat.

I’ve been busy writing, my husband has been out of town, and I can’t pay my children enough money to weed our yard. So for the last few months our backyard has looked like a monarch habitat zone. I see them fluttering around, reminding me that yes, the milkweeds are still there.

I’m pretending that I’m a naturalist. I’m doing it for the monarchs. Grow little milkweeds, grow.

cover weigh in All’s Fair in Love, War, and High School

Since Walker publishing is no more, I’m getting rights back to some of my books. Let me know what you think of the cover for All’s Fair in Love, War, and High School. Are there changes you would make?

And there’s this one:

Why you shouldn’t stop writing

We’ve all been there. That moment where you wonder if writing is really worth the effort. (Actually, it’s not a moment. It’s several moments, days really. And it happens multiple times. So don’t think it will only happen once.) Writing a book is a labor of love. It takes a long time and no one pays you for your early efforts. No one even appreciates them. Years go by and you don’t seem to be any closer to publishing your book.

Or just as bad, you are published and your book dies a quick, unnoticed death.

And don’t get me started on reviews.

But here’s why you shouldn’t quit. As you keep writing, you’ll get better. This point was brought home to me yesterday when I got a comment on one of my earlier doll wrecks posts. (Doll Wrecks, the first blog)

One of the doll artists found my blog and left this very gracious comment:  I can look back at my work from 2008 and am happy to have progressed from there. There is a lot to learn and the art is consistently evolving. It has been such a nice journey and I hope that any new and upcoming reborn artists don’t stop your craft.

Here is a picture of her reborn doll (the second one she’d ever made) that I used on my blog. I may have said (in a totally supportive and lighthearted manner) that it looked like one of those celebrity mug shots where someone is being dragged off to jail for drunken behavior. Okay. I’m sorry. Really.

 

 

 

 

 

But here, after years of practice is her latest doll. (I found it on her facebook page while I was apologizing to her.) Amazing, right? This is why you shouldn’t stop writing. Eventually your manuscript will stop looking like a drunken celebrity. (The metaphor sort of stopped working, but you know what I mean.) You can see more of Lalani’s work at Adorable Bundles Nursery