Janette Rallison's Blog, page 27

What about this cover–new choice

Since the previous covers weren’t all that well received, Su and I tried to copy the original concept a bit more.  The original picture of the girl didn’t have hair. (Like maybe it was pulled back in a pony tail) So I asked her to add hair. What do you think of this?  Oh, and now there’s another cover, so check out the one below it.

What about this cover?

Since the previous covers weren’t all that well received, Su and I tried to copy the original concept a bit more.  The original picture of the girl didn’t have hair. (Like maybe it was pulled back in a pony tail) So I asked her to add hair. What do you think of this?

Rude commentary

You’re probably thinking I have something rude to say here, but that’s not the sort of rude I mean. As I once again prepare for the Enrique Worst Pick Up Lyrics in a Song awards, I’ve been pondering the song Rude by Magic. No, it doesn’t qualify for a nomination because the song is directed at the girl’s father, not the girl. And really, there’s nothing wrong with the lyrics. But when you put the lyrics with the video, ah, that’s a different story.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a cute video. Darling really. Go ahead and watch it so my commentary makes sense.

I admit that the father is obviously in the wrong . Anyone with children knows that they don’t care if you give them their blessing or not, as evidenced by the fact that most of them feel no compunction telling you that every viewpoint you have is wrong. (And you also have no sense of humor, fashion, or direction. They will also laugh if they see you dancing.)

If your child wants to marry someone who is completely wrong for them, there is no talking them out of it. You might as well smile and hope for the best.

Still, I have an irksome need to defend the father in this video. Let’s examine why a loving father might have objections to marrying the guy in the video.

1)  You go to meet your perspective in-law in your best suit, and your best suit is a black leather jacket? I mean, if you’re trying to impress a girl’s conservative father, can’t you spring for a polo shirt? A haircut wouldn’t hurt, either.

2)  You’re going to marry said daughter while wearing a ski cap? Just a head’s up, your future children will openly mock your wedding pictures.

3)  You decide to hold this sacred, once in a life time event in a garage? Gee, I wonder why Dad didn’t want to attend. What Dad doesn’t want to give away his beloved daughter in an garage? Seriously, dude, wasn’t there a park around?

4) And lastly, in the words of the father from the movie My Father, the Hero “You can marry a musician, when all other men are dead.” So you know, there’s that objection too.

Just my thoughts should any band members from Magic wish to court my daughters.

The perils of research

Writers are supposed to be accurate about story details. And we try. Really, I’m sure it bothered me more than anyone else when I realized that characters in Slayers went to BMI airport  instead of BWI. And to tell you the truth, I’m not sure whether the mistake was due to my dyslexia (In my mind, an M is just a W doing push-ups) or whether I thought the airport was Baltimore, Maryland International–Baltimore is in Maryland after all.

(I won’t mention other inaccuracies that have slipped by in my novels as I don’t want to start gritting my teeth . . .) But the point is, I strive to get details right. So when  my writing buddy, Torsha Baker, offered to take me to a shooting range, I thought it would be a good chance  to experience shooting a gun. After all, I have bad guys shoot at the Slayers in both books, and my characters are supposed to be excellent marksmen.

As we drove to the range, Torsha (and her buff police officer husband) gave me the safety lesson. Always assume your gun is loaded. Don’t point it at anything you don’t want to destroy. Don’t put your finger on the trigger until you’re ready to shoot.

Good advice,all. And they were rules I knew because I’d researched gun shooting and had to reread those rules every time I read Slayers revisions.

The problem is that I also know–absolutely–that my Toyota key goes to my Toyota and my Mazda key goes to my Mazda, but have many times stood in front of the Toyota pushing the Mazda key and wondering why the door didn’t unlock.

So I had a silent mantra running through my head the whole time: Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t do anything stupid.

As soon as I walked into the range, I realized that not only did I have to worry about myself doing something stupid. I had to worry about all the people around me doing something stupid, because every one there was armed with loaded guns. And they most likely were not repeating the stupid mantra.

Ah, it is a frightening thing to put your life in the hands of strangers, but then I suppose we do that every time we drive a car.

The first thing I noticed as I walked into the range, is that guns are really, really loud. I had known this beforehand. I was wearing two sets of earplugs. However, I still hadn’t expected gunfire to be that loud. Imagine standing in a room where, at random intervals, several people are popping balloons next to your ear. For the first ten minutes I still jumped every time a gun fired. And a lot of guns fired. I’m sure to the people around me, I appeared to be very twitchy, or perhaps having a seizure of some sort.

The next thing I learned is that guns are really more complicated than they look on TV. You have to remember important details–like the fact that the bullets must point the right direction when you put them in the clip. And the safety? If ever there was a product that should have a clear and well written ON and OFF button, it’s a gun safety. But guns don’t have those sorts of labels. You have to remember whether that little lever is in the ON or OFF position.

Squeezing the trigger was also harder than I thought. This isn’t because I felt sorry for the paper man dangling in front of me. He was holding a paper gun in a menacing sort of way, and therefor had it coming. No, it’s hard to press a trigger because you know doing so will create a really loud noise, so you tend to wince and shut your eyes.

This is not something that leads to accurate shooting, and the paper man mocked me more than once.

That said, I put most of the bullets where they were supposed to go. So if I’m ever attacked by a stationary, rather large man while I happen to be holding someone else’s loaded gun, I’ll be a serious threat.

Will I go out and buy a gun? Not until I can get my keys straight . . .

Weigh in on the cover for Just One Wish

The good news is that I got the rights back to Just One Wish, so I can put it up as an ebook. (And those two lines that my editor made me take out–I am soo putting them back in.) The bad news is that I can’t use the old cover. (I actually liked that cover) But Su at Earthly Charms has come to my rescue.  What do you think of these two covers? Do you think either of them work? If so, which do you think is more appealing?

Comicon

As usual, I had a great time at comicon. If you’ve never been, you feel a little bit like you’ve walked into that bar in the first Star Wars movie.

Here I am, attempting to go back in time to change a few events. (I won’t tell you which.)

And this was a shot I got while walking past Nathan Fillion’s booth. I must say, he looks much different in real life.(Yes, I realize that’s not really him . . .)

 

Phoenix Comicon on Saturday

For those of you who are stuck in the sweltering heat of Arizona, lo, a bright cool spot is on the horizon. Phoenix Comicon is this weekend! Yep, this is your chance to stalk Nathan Fillion. (Not that I’ll be doing that or anything)

My panel will be True Natures, Hidden Identities in Young Adult Fiction : Saturday 3:00pm – 4:00pm  at North 127c. (Wherever that is.)  I’ll be with other cool authors like Laini Taylor, Aprilynne Pike, and Janni Simner.

Hope to see you there! (And for added fun, you can go to the Phoenix Comicon website and see which presenters look like serial killers in their photos. Several of the comic artists look like they may drive big white vans . . . just saying.)

http://www.phoenixcomicon.com/

 

But can she make banana bread?

As you saw two posts ago, I lost my mind and got another dog. (And no, she isn’t completely potty trained yet.) My middle daughter who just graduated from high school was holding her the other day, and said, “She’s so adorable, and she’s got blonde curly hair and brown eyes like me. Hey, wait . . . Did you get this dog to replace me?”

Not consciously. Coincidence? I don’t know. If so, who knows what I’ll have to get when her twin leaves home. Besides, Poppy isn’t a complete replacement because she refuses to wear the apron we keep attempting to foist on her, and she’s never been able to work the mixers with her paws.

My least favorite time of year

Those of you who have been reading my blog for awhile know that my least favorite time of year isn’t any of the sweltering Arizona days that linger for months somewhere  between 115 degrees and an all out inferno. No, although my dislike for the summer months is right up there with my dislike of war, famine, and ticks. (Or vampire spiders, as I call them). My least favorite time of the year is graduation.

It all started nine years ago when my oldest daughter graduated. Yes, I was happy for her. (Top five percent of her class and going to her first choice of universities) But the thing is, she moved out and only came back for short visits. It was like losing my best friend. It was like losing a chunk of my heart. I saw no reason to celebrate the event with cakes, or balloons, or anything else. Would you buy a special cake if you had a lung removed? No, no you wouldn’t because sane people don’t celebrate sad events.

Ever since then, I’ve had a severe loathing for graduation decorations and graduation time in general. I get sad and panicky even when I don’t have another child graduating–which didn’t happen again until three years ago when my oldest son graduated. I cried for a day–and he was staying home to go to community college.

So now it’s graduation time again. This is a big one. My twins are graduating. I have done a good job pretending it won’t happen. Every time I go to a store, I cover my eyes and walk through the aisles, shouting loudly, “La la la! I can’t see you! You don’t exist!”

(You can see my other blogs–and the cakes I think should be made for graduation–at the links below.)

My son recently did a comic strip for his school newspaper on graduation. I’m glad to see I’ve distilled a healthy dislike for the event.

 

http://janetterallison.com/blog/the-graduation-blues/

http://janetterallison.com/blog/why-i-hate-graduation-decorations/

In which I lose my mind

Most people have those insane moments, those moments of weakness where they consider doing something that is clearly stupid. If you are lucky, you don’t have children around to exploit your moments of weakness. I wasn’t lucky.

It started on Thursday afternoon when I was petting our dog, Georgie. She was lying on the floor looking sort of forlorn. I said to my graduating senior daughter, “Georgie will be so sad when you leave home.”

I’m pretty sure Georgie still hasn’t recovered from my oldest son leaving home last September to serve a mission in Colombia. This is probably the reason she lays around looking forlorn so often.

My daughter said, “You should get another dog so Georgie won’t be lonely.”

Immediately younger daughter joined in the conversation, insisting that Georgie needed a friend.

“I don’t want to create more work for myself,” I told the girls.

“Georgie is hardly any work,” Senior daughter pointed out. “So double that is almost nothing.”

Then the girls got on the internet and did a search of available dogs.  There are a lot of cute dogs available. Somehow the girls convinced me that I should go to the pound “just to look”.  As I recall, there were also (unfulfilled) promises of cleaning their rooms when we got back.

Suddenly I was in doggy-jail next to kennels filled with dolefully sad, desperate for attention, barking dogs.

We brought Georgie along, in case we needed to see how she got along with any future best-friends. She immediately pooped in the kennel hallway—either to show the other dogs that she could, or because she isn’t that smart. Misbehaving at the dog pound is the equivalent of shooting your gun off in the police parking lot.

Far from bonding with any of the incarcerated canines, Georgie looked around blankly as though searching for what all the other dogs were barking at.

Again, I never claimed that Georgie was all that intelligent.

I gravitated toward a fluffy poodle-lhasoo mix, (A loodle, I’m assuming) who immediately loved us. When the worker took her out of the kennel, she ran around wagging her tail, licking us, basically saying, “Hey, you’re a  human! I love those!”

Georgie sniffed her disinterestedly and laid down.

When I asked the worker about the loodle’s history she told me the dog was a stray. A woman had adopted her five days ago then brought her back because she wasn’t potty trained. “When dogs are kept in our kennels, they need to be retaught to go outside,” she told me. “The other woman probably didn’t give it long enough.”

The girls insisted that they would help me house-train loodle, and she was so cute and loving that I relented.

We filled out the paperwork, paid the loodle’s bail, and drove her to our home. Georgie thought this was all well and fine until we brought the loodle inside our house. Only then did it occur to Georgie that loodle was staying.  Then she barked to let us know that, “Hey! There’s a dog in the house!”

Thank you, Georgie. You’re an awesome watch dog.

The children set about finding a name for the loodle. “How about Lolly?” I suggested. “Because she’s so sweet. Or maybe Toffee. That’s cute.”

Second son set forth his own list. “How about Backpack, or Cupboard, or Kentucky?”  He apparently doesn’t like nouns as names.

“How about Eleanor?” youngest daughter suggested.

“Nope,” I said. “I have a character in one of my books who’s an Eleanor.”

“How about Charlotte?” youngest daughter asked.

“Nope,” I have a character named Charlotte too.”  Youngest daughter apparently needs to read more of my books.

We decided on Poppette. Poppy for short. That way we can say, “Ello, Poppette” in an English accent. We’re all about sounding British.

Since then, Poppy has been following Georgie around like a sidekick, shadowing everything she does. Which in this case has turned out to be like Dumb and Dumber, the dog version.  I now have two dogs that bark at random and perhaps nonexistent noises.

More later on the joys of potty training.