Anne Calhoun's Blog, page 8
July 19, 2012
First Fruits
Aka: there’s food growing in my back yard!
That, folks, is a table laden with the first fruits of spring labor. 5 cucumbers, all falling into the ginormous category (insert your own inappropriate cucumber joke here), one tomato, and 370 pgs of a book that will release in September, 2013. Now I’m going to slice that tomato, sprinkle it with just a bit of salt, and enjoy.
July 18, 2012
12 Shades of Surrender
I’ve got a post today over at Mills and Boon’s tumblr my thoughts on the emotional component in UNDER HIS HAND and erotic romance in general. Stop by and take a look!
July 16, 2012
Sidewalk Chalk Creativity
I visited my sister in St Paul a couple of weeks ago and found this fabulous sidewalk chalk art during walk in a park near her house.
You are beautiful…you are wonderful…you are doing everything right.
Get your story out.
The Meaning of life is Art.
This one’s a little hard to read because of the light/shadow play on the blacktop, but I liked it best. I took the pictures with my cell phone camera, so there wasn’t much I could do to compensate.
Keep Walking…your destiny awaits.
So say we all!
July 8, 2012
Date Night
On Saturday I picked up the Lacrosse-playing babysitter capable of running herd on both Small Boy and Difficult Dog, and Mr. Calhoun and I went out for the evening. We ended up on the grounds of a local retreat center, walking the labyrinth. (You know…like you do on a date night). The labyrinth is outlined in white rock, with dark brown mulch forming the path, and it’s surrounded by cottonwood trees. I love the sound the wind makes in cottonwoods.
Fallen leaves were strewn all over the path, and I started to pick some up as I walked. At first I thought about the leaves I found was, “Dead leaves.” But as I walked I began to notice how different each of these fallen leaves were from the others on the path. The color spectrum was really spectacular.
That’s all the leaves I picked up, but note the difference in just the shades of…oatmeal, is probably the best choice.
These are my favorites:
A wide range of colors and sizes. A writer’s work is formed in the details. I’m saving all these leaves (I keep a paper journal with a pocket at the back for things like ticket stubs, notes, cards people send, and leaves) for the colors, and the memory of another quiet date night.
July 6, 2012
Yet another test post
Thanks for your patience. We’ll get WP to Twitter working yet.
July 4, 2012
Mother’s Day Garden on the 4th of July
For Mother’s Day this year Hub and Small Boy built me a garden, my first garden ever. On the recommendation of a friend we used Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew to plan the garden, and found it wonderfully simple. Here’s a picture of the garden about a week later:
Here’s the garden today, roughly seven weeks after planting:
I know! Holy kittens, right? Apparently when you plant seeds in good dirt and water them, they grow WILDLY. The biggest tomato:
Beans and peas, ripening nicely:
Gardening is much like writing. You start with empty earth that’s hopefully rich in nutrients like real life experiences, other books you’ve read or written, movies, music, your own inner world, and you do the basic stuff like water the garden and look after it every day, and things will grow. You’ll harvest some of what grows for the book you’re working on, while other fruit will get stored for the next project. The book I’m working on feels a little like this garden, wildly bountiful but a tad overgrown, a little out of control, but the smell of good earth and the joy of seeing something grow out of nearly nothing is such a reward.
Happy 4th of July to you and yours. May it be full of good things.
June 28, 2012
New website goes live!
And…I’m blogging again! Laurie Rauch at WPDivas updated the website with some neat new features, including the slider with book covers (love!), a News page (there’s news there now!) and a sleeker look (now if she could just work the same magic on my hips!)
Enough with the exclamation points. Have a look around.
June 27, 2012
TWELVE SHADES OF SURRENDER – UK version!
Hey, UK readers – great news! Harlequin UK bundled together twelve Spice Briefs working with a theme of surrender, and my hot, short story UNDER HIS HAND was chosen for the anthology. Here’s the new cover:
She broke a little promise…but he’s a man of his word.
Here’s the full lineup for TWELVE SHADES OF SURRENDER:
It’s an awesome lineup! Remember, so far these new covers are available only in the UK, and these are all previously published stories (so if you already own a copy of UNDER HIS HAND, don’t buy a new one unless you want the new cover). If you haven’t read these authors, I recommend them all!
September 17, 2010
WHAT SHE NEEDS and the Sizzling Summer Book Club
What would you do to get what you need?
Thanks to All Romance eBooks for giving a great discount on the book. It's $1.50 after rebate…that's a sweet price for a spicy hot, brief-yet-oh-so-satisfying story! I'll be chatting with SB Sarah and readers on Sunday, September 26, 2010 starting at 9:30 CDT. The chat itself starts at 8:30 CDT (1 hour earlier) and you won't want to miss it! Stop by the SBTB blog to sign into the chat for fun, drinks recipes, and a great discussion!
Want to know more? Visit the WHAT SHE NEEDS page for a blurb and an excerpt…
September 7, 2010
It’s Like Riding a Bike
My son turned six a few weeks ago. The kid’s always been big, like 98th percentile for height and weight from birth (which wasn’t easy, let me tell you) and inherited my awkwardness. Unlike many of his peers he’s very calculating when it comes to the pain/reward ratio. At swim lessons when the other kids were jumping into the pool regardless of the water depth, my son would gauge where he could get in and still touch the bottom of the pool with his head above water. He learned very quickly that falling over on a bike hurts, and therefore would do his absolute best not to fall over. He got pretty good at pedaling, okay at stopping without running into a stationary object – car, parental unit, curb – but could not get himself started from a full stop.
But this weekend we put our collective parental feet down and told him he had to learn how to start the bike in motion by himself, without a push from Dad. His other friends are riding their bikes with ease, and he knows this. Peer pressure motivated him to ask us to take him to the school parking lot to practice, but he struggled to learn how to push the top pedal forward and lift his other foot off the ground and keep pedaling, all which keeping his balance. I could see he was getting frustrated with each failed attempt. He wouldn’t look at us. A bit of angst crept across his little, sharp-chinned face. He stopped talking (a feat so rare it’s like a medical condition on House). So I said we should go home and try again another day.
What happened next might be the best moment I’ve experienced as a parent so far. He said, “No. I don’t want to go home. I can do it.”
This prompted completely out-of-proportion cheering from his dad and me. “Never give up!” we yelled. “Never surrender!” (We’re not ex-military. We’re Galaxy Quest fans, and total geeks.)
Shouting encouragement is all well and good, but I was standing in the parking lot of the elementary school across the street, shivering in shorts and a t-shirt because a cold front dropped the temp a good ten degrees while we were out there, and I felt fear. What if he couldn’t do it, couldn’t muster the physical coordination and balance and all the steps necessary to get the bike started? He runs like his legs don’t bend at the knees, and he occasionally crashes to the floor for no explicable reason whatsoever.
The next try the whole bike-kid unit fell over after two feet. We said nothing. He got up from his awkward scramble of bike and limbs.
“You have to commit,” my husband called to him. “Commit to going forward! You can do it!”
Come on, honey. Commit. Push the pedal forward, lift your other foot, and commit to motion.
What I said was, “Never give up, honey.”
More silence. His gaze was focused somewhere in the distance as he picked up the bike and straddled it, and I could see him thinking through how to do this, as if he knew there was more at stake than just getting the bike started on his own. His pride, his sense of self as an individual with some control over his world was at stake, and that’s a huge deal when you’re six. You control so little of your life when you’re six.
Left foot on the pedal. Right foot on the ground. He shimmied the top pedal forward, pushed off, lifted his right foot, and he was IN MOTION.
Cue the parental screaming. From our reaction you’d have thought he landed on the moon, and you could have driven a Mack truck through the grin on my son’s face. He stopped, all James Dean casual. He started again, this time riding in figure eights around the parking lot, cutting the turns a little close, but showing off a little, too. Another stop. Another start, and this time he looked at us, the parents still shouting like total morons, like “What’s the big fucking deal?”
The BFD, kiddo, isn’t that you can ride a bike. It’s that you didn’t quit. You said you was going to do it, you stuck it out through the failed attempts, and you did it. Today you’re my inspiration, little man, and inspiration for anyone out there who’s run into obstacles in pursuit of a dream.
NEVER GIVE UP! NEVER SURRENDER!
