Sherry Lewis's Blog, page 18

A Random Thought on Thursday

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

-- Dorothy Nevill

Found on the in other words... site. 



Isn't that the truth? 

The Road to . . .

I have the very best of intentions. Really, I do. I begin every year vowing to be a better family member, a better friend, a better author. I vow to buy birthday cards for those closest to me and (better yet) actually mail them—on time! I know! The very concept leaves me breathless.



Every year I promise myself that I’ll blog regularly and fill the internet with witty chatter about my interesting life (the one I vow I’m going to have this year) and all my amazing activities (the ones I swear I’m going to actually participate in.)



And then reality sets in and 10 months later I’m looking at all the things I promised myself faithfully that I’d do this year, but haven’t, and I wonder what happened???



Sure, there’s work to do and books to write and the house to clean and the dog to walk and the cat to continually move from my lap to the floor so I can actually do all of those things. And there are illnesses and emergencies that get in the way. But not every day, and not all the time. So what happened?



I used to be one of the most prolific authors I knew. I was focused. Dedicated. Determined. That was okay, but I was also . . . rude. I rolled my eyes at excuses and thought that anybody could write three or four really good books a year if only they’d put their mind to it. I was convinced that anybody who was struggling to write must not really want to write.



Yeah. I know. I apologize to every writer in the entire world. I’m not joking.



I was one of those people you asked to take on a project because, as we all know, if you want something done you give it to a busy person. I worked three jobs at a time, or worked two and went to school in my spare time. I was a single mom, so raising the kids, running the house, keeping up the yard, and bringing home the bacon fell on my shoulders alone. I had to do it all, and I did. (Admittedly, I fell a bit short on some things. I mean, c’mon. It’s impossible to do everything well, right? Right? So let’s not talk about the yard, okay?)





But for the past few years I’ve felt as if I’m on the proverbial road to hell and that road really is paved with my good intentions. Somewhere along the way I hit the wall. I spent so long burning the candle at both ends that, apparently, the ends finally met in the middle.

I also encountered a few very challenging life experiences, a couple of which shattered my entire world. It has taken me a long, l-o-n-g time (and a whole lot of prayer) to find my way back from those. Back in my “everybody can write if they really want to” days, I didn’t factor in those earth-shaking, rock-your-world, leave you empty and shaking in the corner things that eventually happen to all of us.



I’ve always been an avid list-maker and goal-setter. But now, instead of producing long lists of tasks I’ve accomplished every day, I find myself staring at long lists of tasks I haven’t managed to complete. Lists are no longer my friend, they’re my guilty conscience.



But no matter how it happened, it’s way past time to get back on track. And I mean it this time.



Maybe I can’t fill the internet with witty chatter about my interesting and varied activities, but I can be honest about where I am and what I’m doing to pull myself up by my bootstraps.



Today I’m going to declare a dream and write it down with a date. My plan is to read through the very first book I ever wrote, which is also the first book I sold way back when. I recently got the rights to that series along with the rights to a few of my romances back from my publisher, and I’m going to release them all in Kindle format. That’s my big dream, but let’s take it one at a time.



Dream: Start with No Place for Secrets.



Date: Publish the book by October 31, 2013. That makes it a firm goal.



Steps: Since this book was written back in the olden days, everything after the first draft was done in hard copy, so the manuscript on my computer needs some work before it matches the finished product. So my steps are to read and polish one chapter at a time and celebrate the tiny victories along the way.

I remember this from back in the day: celebrating a small victory leads to more small victories. Repeatedly beating oneself up over small failures leads to inertia.



Action: Well … that’s pretty obvious. Now that I have my Grand Master Plan, I have to do the work. My plan is to track the steps here on my website, chapter by chapter, to keep me accountable. Steps + Action.

As for those birthday cards … my oldest niece has a birthday coming up later this month. I could wait until the beginning of the year and start over then, but why wait? I say, begin right where you are.

Sugar Cookie Follow-up

Yesterday I posted about a recipe that caught my eye while I was poking around on Pinterest. It's a recipe for a sugar cookie bar that (allegedly) tasted just like one of my favorite guilty pleasures, the gas-station sugar cookie (also known as Granny B's). At the very moment I was blogging about my love of Granny B's most amazing cookie and the recipe I'd found that was supposed to taste just like it, some very dear friends (honorary nieces, really) were trying to stir up a batch of sugar cookies for the Wednesday night class they teach at church. Unfortunately, the project wasn't going all that well.



Their mom saw my blog post, printed off the recipe, and the twins started over. I'm delighted to announce that not only did the sugar cookie bar recipe work much better than the cookie recipe they were trying to follow, but (dear, wonderful young women that they are) they saved a couple for me so I could see whether they lived up to my hopes that they'd successfully satisfy a Granny B's craving.



The verdict? Yum!!!!!!!



Will the recipe satisfy a craving for those of us who live in locations where Granny B's isn't available? I say a resounding yes!



Thank you High Heels and Grills!

Guilty Pleasures: The Gas Station Sugar Cookie

Okay. I'll admit it. I love those sugar cookies you find at the gas station. You know the ones, don't you? They're slathered with thick pink frosting and individually wrapped. I'm not sure why I like them so much. I shouldn't like them, but I do. I never try to make them, even though I've thought about it a gazillion times. A homemade sugar cookie is bound to be better than the gas station variety, isn't it?



Trouble is, in order to make a sugar cookie good enough to satisfy my Granny B's craving, I'd have to make the cookie dough, roll out the dough, cut the cookies, and bake them. Then there's the whole frosting issue. Can I just buy it in a can, or would I have to make a homemade frosting? And if the frosting had to be homemade, did I even have a recipe that would be good enough to top the cookies if I went to all the trouble to make them?



So when I stumbled across this recipe for sugar cookie bars on Pinterest this morning, everything else flew right out of my head. I couldn't get back to work until I'd pinned the recipe and made sure the pin actually took me to the recipe (a consistent problem on Pinterest. Is there anything more frustrating than pinning a recipe or a DIY project, going back to it with hopes high, only to discover the pin takes you either to a warning that the page is unsafe or a picture without recipe and/or instructions???)



So, for anyone like me who would love to make a good pink-frosted sugar cookie without the muss and fuss, this link should take you right to High Heels & Grills, the blog where I found the recipe.



You're welcome :-))



Now it's your turn? What's your favorite guilty pleasure?

To Buy or Not to Buy

I've been browsing the free books available for Kindle and Nook lately. I've picked up a few along the way, which is great, but mostly I've been learning about my buying habits as a reader. I've learned, for example, that sometimes even a big fat nothing is more than I'm willing to pay for a book. That seems a bit odd, even to me. I mean, I'm a book addict. Big time. You'd think I'd happily score every free book I could get my hands on. And yet I don't.



Here's what I've realized about what attracts me to a book and what puts me off. Okay, mostly what puts me off. As a bona fide book addict, I'll admit that if it doesn't put me off, it can be counted as attractive to me.



1. Covers do matter. Unless I recognize your name, if your cover was obviously put together on your computer using Paint, I'm probably going to pass. That's not a guarantee, but it's a high probability. Likewise, if your cover is obviously a generic cover you've purchased from someone else, I'm likely to pass. The probability of this is lower than it is for the Paint cover, or a cover without graphics, but it is likely. The good news is that in the case of a generic paste-in-your-title-and-name cover, I may click through to read the back cover blurb if it appears to be in a genre I like to read, but unless the cover copy really grabs me, I'm probably still going to pass. Yes, it's true that you can't (always) judge a book by its cover, but the fact that this saying exists at all is proof that a lot of people do.



2. Your cover copy matters. A lot. If your cover copy is poorly written and/or grammatically incorrect, it's a definite pass for me. I might be a book addict, but I'm a demanding reader. Back before I knew the industry lingo, I would frequently stop reading a book if the writing felt "obvious" to me. That's the term I used then. Now I realize it's a combination of several things including telling more than showing, heavy-handed emotions, purple prose, and author intrusion. But before I even get to that point with your book, you have to convince me to read page one. If it's obvious to me from the cover copy that you don't know how to use the language, that you don't understand basic grammar, or that you don't know how to edit your own work, I'll skip right past your book and never look back.



3. Titles matter. One of the reasons publishers have marketing departments is to create titles with appeal to many readers. Appeal that we, as writers, don't always understand. For most of us, marketing is not what we're good at, even if we think we are. Too many of us come up with titles we think are amazing, but in reality they're quite generic, uninteresting, and unimaginative. Oh, we think the title is appealing. We might even think it's unique. We wouldn't put the thing on our book if we didn't. But I have discovered that if your title is something like Tripping and it's book 1 in the Tripping Series, and especially if your protagonist is named John Tripping, I'm likely to pass on the book even if it's free. Why? Because I've realized that  if your title and your series are the same -- and especially if you've used the same word three times -- I come away with the impression that you're not very imaginative. Is this true of you? Maybe not. But that's my first impression.



4. First impressions matter. I wish they didn't, but they do.



5. Price matters. Yes, I know we're talking about free books here, but I've identified another knee-jerk reaction when I'm considering whether to click through and "buy" a book for nothing. I have realized that I am much more interested in a free book if the original cover price is listed as $5.99 or higher. If the cover price is $12.99 or $14.99 I'm almost giddy over the chance to get it for nothing. If the original cover price is $2.99 -- or worse, $0.99 -- my initial impression is that the book probably hasn't been professionally edited, which means the writing is likely to be "obvious" and I'm not interested. Is this always true? Maybe. Maybe not. I'm not talking about reality here. I'm talking about my initial reaction to what I see on the screen.



I don't know if any of this matters to you, but it gives me a lot of food for thought. I haven't yet put any of my own backlist out there in e-book format, probably because life got really hard a couple of years ago and I'm struggling just to catch up with where I'm supposed to be. But I've been thinking about re-releasing my backlist and one of these days I'll probably do it. And that makes what I'm learning about myself and my buying habits, my reactions to other peoples' books, very interesting to me.



And now I'd love to hear from you. Am I the only one who passes up what might be a perfectly good book based on first impressions? I'd love to know what attracts you (or doesn't) when you're trying to decide whether to click on that free book.

Tote Bags and Toe Tags

Tote Bags and Toe Tags by Dorothy Howell



My rating: 5 of 5 stars





Engaging and well-written story with a heroine I (frankly) did not expect to like, but ended up loving. Haley is young and scattered and easily distracted. Her work ethic would drive me absolutely nuts if I were her boss, but she made me laugh out loud more than once as she admitted to drifting off during a conversation. I will definitely read more in this series.







View all my reviews

A Message to Romance Writers from My Son-in-Law

This afternoon, my little family went out to lunch together. My oldest daughter had received a gift card to Red Lobster for her birthday, invited me to lunch, and then invited my youngest daughter and her family to join us. We had to move quickly to sandwich lunch in between church and the playoff game between the Cards and ... whoever they're playing today.



We met at the restaurant, spent an appropriate amount of time deciding who got to look out the window at the water and who got to sit beside whom. Once the seating arrangements were decided, we looked over the menu, tossed around a few suggestions about what sounded good, and eventually placed our orders.



After a few minutes, our food arrived and we all dug in with gusto amid chatter about everyday things. It was a typical lunch for our family . . . until my son-in-law looked up at me and said, "I need to ask you a favor."



I blinked a couple of times in surprise, mostly because this guy isn't really a favor-asker. He's more of a favor-doer. He's a manly man, a member of our country's armed forces, and an all-around good guy. About the only times he asks me for anything, it's to arrange a sleepover with the incredibabies so he and mom can have a date night. Between you and me, he's the kind of guy I'd like to see more romance heroes modeled after. He's a solid guy with solid values. Honest. Good to his wife and kids. Just the real deal, if you know what I mean.



Anyway . . . the favor.



"Sure," I said. "What is it?"



"I don't know how you'd accomplish this," he said, "but I'd like you to ask all the romance authors out there to stop writing vampire romances."



Blink. Blink. Of all the things I might have expected to hear coming out of this man's mouth, this didn't appear anywhere on the list. I wondered for a moment if he was joking, but he looked deadly serious. I swallowed a bite of salad and said, "Oh? Why?"



"Because they're ruining the good name of vampires." He put his fork down, a sure sign that things were about to get serious. "I happen to like vampires, but all this romance stuff that's going on is just wrong. Vampires don't fall in love with people. Vampires eat people." By which I assume he meant that vampires drain people's bodies of blood but don't actually eat the . . . you know . . . person.



"Mmm-hmm," I said with a thoughtful nod. I could tell that this was really troubling him, and I wanted to give it my full attention, but I was a bit distracted by the question of just where, when, and how he'd picked up on the vampire romance craze. My daughter doesn't read that subgenre of romance, and I hadn't noticed any vampire romance novels lying around the house, but then I don't poke around everywhere when I'm visiting. They could have been out of sight somewhere. Or maybe he'd read a few during his last deployment, or his recent TDY in Peru.



"We just finished watching Eureka," my daughter explained, clearly noting my confusion. "We talked about watching Firefly, but instead we watched a couple of episodes of Vampire Diaries."



My son-in-law made a rude noise. "It was awful," he said, and then leaned forward a little. "Look, I put up with the whole Twilight thing, but now it's gotten out of hand. At the rate things are going, everybody's going to forget about the real vampire. The only image they'll have in their heads is some guy with spiked hair and mascara--and glitter."



You have to understand the kind of man my son-in-law is to hear the proper inflection in that last word. Real men don't wear glitter. Real men--even those with two princess-loving daughters--can hardly say the word out loud.



The conversation went on for a few more minutes, wandering over topics like Vlad the Impaler, The Vampire Lestat, and guy-liner, and by the time we moved on, I could see the problem through my son-in-law's eyes.  And so, because I love this guy dearly, and because he's done more favors for me than I can count, I implore you all to stop with the vampire romance thing. Do it now! Before you ruin the image of real vampires forever.

Book Review: Flamingo Diner

Flamingo Diner by Sherryl Woods



My rating: 3 of 5 stars





I added this book to my to-be-read pile based on the cover alone and didn't realize what it was about until I picked it up to read it. The subject of suicide is a touchy one for me, so I approached it hesitantly. It turns out, I didn't need to worry since that part of the story never actually reached me on an emotional level. I applaud the author for tackling such a sensitive and important issue, but I wanted it to take me deeper into the characters' emotions as they tried to put the world back together again after the family tragedy.



The story was too slow moving for my taste (the heroine vowed to find out why her father took his own life for at least half of the book without ever actually making any attempts to find out anything.) I looked forward to the strong sense of community promised on the book's jacket, but that, too, fell short of my expectations.



As disappointed as I was with the suicide story line, however, I thought Ms. Woods handled the romance between Emma and Matt very well. Their attraction built slowly, but anything more rapid would have felt unrealistic to me.



Not destined for my "keeper" shelf, but not a wall-banger, either :)







View all my reviews

Book Review: Celebrations

Celebrations: Rituals of Peace and Prayer by Maya Angelou



My rating: 5 of 5 stars





Maya Angelou is a genius, plain and simple. Her words are like honey. They trickle down into the soul, little by little, slowly, soothing pain and lifting the spirit on their way. Every piece in this collection marks some special event, thus the title Celebrations. "On the Pulse of the Morning," read at President Clinton's inauguration; "Amazing Peace," presented at the 2005 lighting of the National Christmas Tree at the White House; "A Brave and Startling Truth," which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations, a poem for Oprah's fiftieth birthday, one for the bar mitzvah for Angelou's nephew, and several others.



As I set this book aside, a few stanzas stay with me, working their way through the maze of my mind and finding their permanent place in my soul. Definitely recommended.







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Foodie Friday: Chicken Bake

Chicken Bake(Serves 8-10)

This recipe is cheesy and gooey and a definite comfort food in my house. In its original version (below) it makes a lot, but it's easy to cut in half!



2 cans cream of chicken soup

2 cans cream of mushroom soup (can use cream of celery if you prefer)

2 cups sour cream

2 cups grated cheddar cheese

8-10 boneless skinless chicken breasts

Paprika



Rice, prepared according to package directions.



Preheat oven to 350.

Sprinkle the chicken breasts with paprika and place in large baking dish.

Mix the remaining ingredients together and pour over top.

Cover and bake (at 350) for 2 hours.



Serve over rice.