Renée Harrell's Blog, page 7

Our Bucket List isn't very long...

…and it mostly involves small triumphs, like petting happy baby animals all around the world and finding a packet of dark chocolate-dipped Peeps to enjoy together some fine Easter. While naked.
 
And in a hot tub.

In New Zealand.

As much as we’d enjoy those wonders, we realize we haven’t placed many items on our BL. There are all kinds of internet sites available to help us expand our list (and yours, if you’re so inclined), including a few that will tell you specifically what you should do – such as this one, which offers 101 Things To Do Before You Die.

The 101 Things team created a fairly basic Bucket List, especially if you’ve already made it past your twenties. Between us, the Renee Harrell has done at least 63 of the items and possibly more, depending on how the author cared to define things. We bet you’ve done a bunch, too. Run barefoot? Experience a sunset? Not too tough to check those challenges off anyone’s wish list.

The 101 Things team does toss in a couple of goodies that are going to be big league challenges for almost any of us. Personally, we doubt that we’ll “gain enlightenment” or “have an out-of-body experience” during either of our lifetimes. It’s not that we wouldn’t like achieving either of these goals, it’s just that those particular goals are very subjective and possibly outside of our skill set. Besides, we think there’s a chance that eating dark chocolate-dipped Peeps will help us gain enlightenment so why not go for the tasty treat?

You doubt us but, oh, we too briefly tasted those dark chocolate wonders. Not naked, or in a hot tub, or while visiting New Zealand, but still.

Then there are those items the 101 Things team suggested that instantly fell onto our Phucket List. Oh, you know the Phucket List. It’s what we call, 101 Things To Avoid Doing Before We Die. Those are the activities, events, or random bits of insanity that, no matter how much other people say they intend to try them, we will never, ever do because – unlike these other people – we are willing and eager to embrace our limitations.

At the top of our Phucket List?  Eating fugu. In an article headlined,  Fugu: the fish more poisonous than cyanide, BBC.com says, The Japanese delicacy fugu, or blowfish, is so poisonous that the smallest mistake in its preparation could be fatal. The same article says the meal is awfully expensive and, if you manage not to die while eating it, you’ll discover your fishy entree tastes like chicken.

We’ve already eaten chicken. We discovered we like chicken. Do you know what we tell people? It tastes just like fugu, but without the death.

So tetrodotoxin poisoning is #1 on our list. The second item is climbing Mount Everest, and for good reason. After all, one patch of the mountain is called “the Death Zone” because so many people die there. Then we discovered, there’s all kinds of paperwork and training involved before you can go, the trip can cost over $100,000 dollars, and vomiting and diarrhea are two of the symptoms that await the brave explorers. It’s not for us, thank you. Besides, any adventure that requires the use of a pee funnel is an adventure we won’t be having.

As far as adventures we are having? Babelcube continues to do its best to find us new readers, while not actually sending us any royalties. After Things Went Bad will have been translated into German by the end of the week and, yesterday, we received a new offer to have those same stories translated into Italian. We regretfully passed on seeing Frankenstein, P.I., in Spanish. We’ve gone through the first pass on a new audio book for one of our novellas, remembering (a little too late) how much work was involved in editing an audio book. Our fantasy novel will launch on April 8th under a new pen name…and the cover is so good, we almost posted it with this blog. At the last minute, we pulled it and posted – well, whatever it is we’ve stuck in the upper left hand corner. As we write this, we’re not exactly sure what’s going there.

Maybe we’ll do a reveal of the fantasy book next month. Probably we won’t. After all, it’s not much of a pen name if everyone knows it, is it?

Reading: Ozma of Oz. Written by Eric Shanower, based on L. Frank Baum’s original story, and illustrated by Skottie Young. The illustrations alone are more than worth it.

Watching: We grew excited when we saw that Redbox had A DVD available with the title, Frankenstein vs The Mummy . At that instant, we knew exactly how we were going to spend the upcoming evening -- until a reviewer popped up, warning potential viewers (*spoiler*) there’s very little Frankenstein versus Mummy action at all. It seems like such a cheat, doesn't it?  Happily, a friend recommended the 8-episode Broadchurch Season One series, over on Netflix, allowing us to enjoy our popcorn, after all. The acting is terrific and the story is gripping. While the story is sadly lacking in both Frankenstein and any Mummies so far, you never know about the Brits. We're only on Ep 5 and still have hope.

In the USA, it's Super Bowl Sunday...

…which means, let’s be honest, no one in North America is going to read this blog today. Overseas, we might get a few readers, but we figure the guy to the left, Harun, isn’t going to be one of them. We hope not, anyway.
 
You see, Harun is part of a farmers group in Kakamega North District, Kenya, and they’re needing a loan to buy “cost efficient maize seeds and fertilizer for the coming harvest season” – and, via Kiva, we’ve just tossed a few bucks in the pot. However, if Harun is taking the day off, kicking back with a Budweiser and watching some football with his five kids, we might have backed the wrong horse.

Yeah, we understand, a man has five children, he probably needs a few hours to relax. But not today. After all, we hear that harvesting season is coming.

We’re not watching the big game, either. Super Bowl overkill has dampened our enthusiasm to the point that we kinda don’t care. Instead, we’re pulling tax forms from all of the distributors of “Renee Harrell” books and stories: Amazon, SmashWords, Draft2Digital, Apple, Kobo, B&N, a few others, and, running the numbers just now, we realize that Renee Harrell made very little money in book sales and electronic downloads this year. Our other pen name saw a significant increase in royalties, thanks for asking, but this pseudonym is scrambling to make a buck.

If we wrote follow-up novels to our existing R.H. books, we’d probably see an uptick in sales. It seems likely, anyway. A reader of The Atheist’s Daughter or Something Wicked will occasionally send us an email, wanting to know what happens next, but almost no one has contacted us in regards to Aly’s Luck. Luck was one of our first novels, and we love it still today, but that love is not shared by a large readership.

So, of course, shortly before Thanksgiving, one of us wakes up and tells the other, “We have to write a sequel to Aly’s Luck.” Since the sequel idea was fantasy-oriented – heavy on the dragons, sprinkled with fairies, absent of almost all of the elements of the published version – this led to a rather interesting discussion. Then the waker-upper reminded the sleeper-inner that Luck was originally written as a fantasy (heavy on one particular dragon, sprinkled with buckets of fairies) but altered to satisfy a publisher’s sci-fi request.

To make the sequel work, all we had to do was change the first story back.

If we weren’t our own publishers, we could never do this. But since we are, we did, adding 9,000 words to the manuscript along the way and returning the glossary we’d once created for the novel. Using a new pen name, we ran the story past several beta readers, found an amazing artist for the new cover, and we’re readying the manuscript for March launch date. If it finds a readership, we’ll tackle the sequel. If you’re one of the dozen fans of the original Luck, it’ll still be out there, but only in audiobook form. Since Alexander McConnell did a great job with the narration, you might want to try it, anyway.

Meanwhile, enjoy the football game, the chips and a few bowls of Nacho cheese. Except for you, Harun.

Reading: Stephen King’s Revival. It’s as dark a story as he’s written in some years, but we love his love for H.P. Lovecraft.

Watching: People keep telling us we need to grab the second season of American Horror Story (Asylum) but we’re in the mood for something light. It doesn’t get any lighter than Scorpion King 4. Oh, and if you’re a Lou Ferrigno fan, don’t be fooled by his appearance on the DVD’s cover. He’s in the flick for about eight minutes. Maybe seven.

We were determined to start 2015 off right...

...which meant, among other things, that we'd get our first blog post of the year up in time. Since you're reading this, you know we've done as we wanted and, score!, the year is already a winner.
 
The previous year, 2014, didn't end up quite as nicely. The narrator for one of our novellas contacted us to say she wouldn't have the project done in time for the Christmas rush. (Although we've been at this for a couple of years now, we've never actually experienced a Christmas rush for our stuff. Who's to say this wouldn't have been the first time?) Inclement weather had kept her away from her recording studio and the howling storms outside her window would have messed with the sound quality, anyway.  She's promised to get the polished and perfect audio version to us by January 15th.
 
Just in time for the mid-January rush.
 
The very next day, no kidding, the woman working on the Italian translation for Twisted Games said that life had thrown her a curve ball, too, and our fan base in Italy would have to wait a few weeks longer to get the translated story. This surprised us, mostly because we didn't know we had a fan base in Italy, but we should be able to see the final files by...January 15th.
 
Also in time for the mid-January rush. We're telling you, we'll be making some sweet coin in another couple of weeks.

And, then, yesterday, inches and inches of snow began hitting our normally-dry little mountain town. Although the picture on the upper left was taken early in the process, enough of the white stuff started falling that the Road Authority People began closing down the surrounding highways and byways. Knowing there was nowhere we could go, we were forced to stay home in our pajamas, pop popcorn, and watch Black Adder (so good) and Fawlty Towers (so good) and Bob's Burgers (also, the good thing), with a Chihuahua on our laps. It turns out, the Chi also likes unsalted, butter-free popcorn.
 
Now that we think about it, 2014 didn't end so badly after all. We hope your coming year is a good one, too.
 
Reading: Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, blahblahblah by Ellen Lupton. The subtitle doesn't actually include the "blahblahblah" but I've already given you the important part of the thing. The book claims to be "the definitive guide to using typography in visual communication" and the cover designer half of our team is wanting to flex a few new muscles. Renee hasn't done a fantasy cover before and she's eager to rock it.
 
Watching: Ragnarok (2013 version) because how often do you get to watch a subtitled Norwegian adventure/horror flick that's partially set in the Oslo Viking museum? If you don't like the subtitle thing, this won't be for you; and if you like a dash of gore, sex, or profanity in your flicks, this won't work for you, either. For us, on New Years Eve? Perfect.

The end of the year is rushing upon us...

...and half of the team is kinda scrunched up right now. It’s not a permanent condition – we hope – but an extremely sore back has sent one of us to bed and trying to sleep. Some really good medications might help with that but this particular person refuses to see the doctor. The other part of Team Turner wasn’t prepared to do a blog this month but...well, here we are, aren’t we? It’s December 1st and new words need to be posted.

Since 2014 is almost in the books, let’s talk. In last month’s note, we mentioned how little money we were making through Babelcube as of 11/01/2014. We’re happy to report that this month’s royalty statement is almost triple the last number we reported. Less happily, we realize we’re still months away from being able to pay for a Tall coffee at the local Starbucks. But our Babelcube riches could very well be about to increase. You see, a new translator has contacted us, eager to do an English-to-Italian take on our novella, Twisted Games. 

Clearly, this new translator must not have read last month’s blog.

Since Twisted Games is a paranormal romance laced with frequent interludes of sexiness, we thought it might actually find the audience that has so far avoided After Things Went Bad. Plus, those Italians, they just love love. That’s what Harrell’s very Italian grandfather used to say. Either that, or I’m quoting a Pink song. But one or the other.

So we decided to take Victoria up on her offer. We’ve already vetted the first ten pages of the translation -- we don’t speak or read other languages, sadly, but we know Italians who know Italian -- and the finished product should be available in Sicily before Christmas. If only we could afford to travel there and see for ourselves.

Around  the same time, we received a message from a narrator of erotic fiction.  This very experienced voice artist wanted to do an audiobook of one of our romances. We hesitated to tell her that this particular story’s title sounded all hot and bother-y but the actual piece was quite tame. Clothing mostly remains on, only a couple of people end up in bed together  (and they’re married, which we find sexy but most readers don’t), and it’s not even close to erotica. Turned out, she knew that. Turned out, she also narrates straight romantic fiction under a different name. After listening to her audition, we gave her a thumbs-up, too.

If we don't see you until next month, may your holidays be joyous.

Reading: Tinseltown by William J. Mann. This is fun non-fiction that reads just like fiction. Even better, Mann tells you who he thinks murdered famed film director, William Desmond Taylor...and why.

Watching: Constantine. Okay, yep, the show started a little bumpy. It still hasn’t found its balance, we don’t think, but it’s getting there. And the lead, Matt Ryan, couldn’t be better.

Today is November 1st, known as All Saints' Day in many parts of the world...

…and as the post-Halloween hangover in many others. We realized a couple of things about Halloween this year: (1) It’s much more fun when there are little ones in the house; and (2) we really, really need to get a couple of new costumes.

For too many years now, Harrell has gone as Clark Kent-changing-into-Superman and Renee has been a Medieval Farm Wench and/or Maiden, depending on her mood on the particular day. Two such disparate costumes don’t play well together (“So pleased I could save you, Medieval Farm Maiden,” says Superman. “Aieee!” cries the rescued Maiden. “It’s a demon from the skies!”) and neither outfit is looking any better for all of the wear. So, as soon as we’re done here, we’ll be hitting the Spirit Store to search for discounted alternatives.

We can afford to do this because, thanks to the team of story translators at Babelcube, we have a little extra change in our pockets. According to the Babelfolk, the Spanish and Portuguese editions of After Things Went Bad are now available pretty much worldwide. And how many sales has ATWB netted, secondary to this massive distribution?

Not quite as many as Harrell had hoped. And exactly as many as Renee had feared. Our royalties to date have totaled…thirteen cents. (Our poor translators are paid along with us, penny-for-penny. We feel so bad for them.)

In other news, we finished our five-part romance/sf/horror/fantasy serial before realizing it needed to lose the horror and fantasy segments and be put out as a standalone novel. Under a brand new pen name, since standalone novels issued by unknown writers are always popular in the e-book world.

That’s what Harrell planned, anyway. Renee has her own opinions about such foolishness but has tabled the discussion until our latest set of beta readers weigh in. Which oughta be any day now.

Watching: Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow with Tom Cruise. A lot of fun even though, seriously, who came up with that title? Oh, we got around to Gotham . A lot of fun and we should have started watching sooner. Why didn't you tell us?

Reading: Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials. Which, believe it or not, is the exact same title we intended to use for our new novel, even though our story focuses on one woman, is set in modern Mississippi, and doesn’t include a trial, of witches or anyone else. Still: talk about coincidence.

Happy All Saints’ Day!

A well-known publisher wants us badly...

...and in a big way. Although, they could just want our money. You decide.
 
When we copyrighted our last novel a few months ago, we did so prior to publication -- and under a different title than the one we used when it actually hit the e-book market. So the only people who knew the novel as "Project: Runaway" (now you know why we changed the moniker) were the two of us, the crew at the U.S. Copyright Office, and...as it turns out...the marketing staff at Dorrance Publishing.
 
According to Dorrance Publishing, Dorrance Publishing is "America's oldest author services company". Which isn't what is said here and here, but it's better than being called a vanity press. It's believed by some of our fellow writers (but not by us, according to our lawyer's advice) that such outfits prey on the foolishly optimistic and the greatly uninformed, charging thousands of dollars for their services. For some absolutely legal reason, Team Dorrance is allowed to fish through the government's registration files and contact new copyright holders.
 
For the past several days, we've received multiple emails from Dorrance Publishing. They want us to know how interested they are in Project: Runaway and how eager they are to review the manuscript. The other day, they even called our house, such was their excitement. Since they know nothing about the actual story we've told, we have to assume they're motivated solely by the novel's title. The title that we've discarded.
 
But they're America's oldest author services company, so who are we to say we shouldn't have kept the title?
 
We've tried to direct their communications to our internet junk file but the Dorrance Jedi Spam Masters are smarter than Google and Firefox combined. Day after day, another one of their emails slips through Google's defenses, offering us yet another chance to give them our money...um, our manuscript. Hopefully, one of their sales people -- no, we're wrong, these are Publishing Consultants -- will contact us on a day when we're home. If that happens, one of us can tell him or her that we've already published the book, it's had time to climb up and down the sales charts, and we've already collected a dozen or so reviews as we write its sequel.
 
Or maybe it's better they never know. They love Project: Runaway so much, they'll only be heartbroken.
 
We've received a couple of other offers last month, too. A lovely gent contacted us through Bablecube, wanting to translate our short story set, After Things Went Bad, into Italian. We were open to the idea -- after all, the Spanish and Portuguese translations were kind of fun -- but he then added that he'd never done a written translation before. He hoped we could check his work, just to make certain he was doing it right. Since we didn't know how to do that, we decided to pass.
 
A week ago, we heard from a woman who wants to narrate one of our romance novellas. Not Twisted Games but one of the titles under another of our pseudonyms. This narrator specializes in super steamy erotica. We told her, politely, that our story lacked almost all of the elements a listener would want in a hot and sexy story. She said she didn't care, she wanted to do the narration, anyway. So we signed a contract and our non-erotic story, narrated by an erotic specialist, should be out in December.
 
Ho, ho, ho.
 
Reading: Poking a Dead Frog by Mike Sacks. And enjoying it very much, thank you.
 
Watching: Gotham. Well, not yet but soon. By Week Four or Five, certainly. Probably
 

So it's Labor Day in the USA and...

…are we resting, as mandated by Federal law? We are not. We’re right at work, filling in this blog. We’ve learned a few things recently and we want to share them with you.

(1)   Don’t go to Mesa, Arizona, at the end of August. As it turns out, Southern Arizona is meltingly hot this time of year. You wouldn’t think we’d be surprised by this but, hey, we aren’t all that observant. We went to Mesa’s own Arizona Natural History Museum a couple of days ago and the nearby bank sign proclaimed it was 111 degrees (F). We don’t know what that is in (C) but, still, too damned hot.

(2)   Something else we discovered is, don’t go to Mesa’s own Arizona Museum of Natural History unless you have children with you. There were dozens of kids running around the place and, from what we observed, they loved being there. They can touch a petrified dinosaur bone, or watch a pretend T. Rex yawn (we think that’s what it was doing), and they can even pan for gold. For older folks? Well, we just got depressed. One of the museum's displays is an IBM Selectric Typewriter and visitors were supposed to guess the purpose of the machine. Because it’s such an ancient artifact. Harrell looked at it and said, “I used to type on one of those.” Right about then, a couple of children gathered around him, hoping they could watch him yawn.
 
(The image above? Harrell and Renée, enjoying downtown Mesa.) (Yeah, Harrell should have put on sunblock.)

(3)   If you are in Mesa at the end of August (or any day except a Sunday), stop at Mango’s Mexican Cafe. The food is really, really good but they were out of tamales. Now we desperately want to eat an order of their tamales.

Meanwhile, while you enjoy a barbeque, or run off to see Guardians of the Galaxy for a third time, or simply soak in a tub while enjoying a glass of Picton Bay South Island Pinot Noir (cheap, Trader Joe’s, worth it), what are we doing for the rest of this holiday? We’re glad you asked.

Three months ago, one of our writing friends told us that serials are climbing the sales charts on Amazon. Serials aren’t new: The Pickwick Papers was the serial that shot Charles Dickens to fame – he put out a new part of the story every month, from March, 1836 to October, 1837 – and several modern writers are now following his lead. Our buddy suggested we try one and we thought it sounded like fun. Putting our other work-in-progress on hold, we dug in, rolled up our shirt sleeves, and got to work. We were almost finished with the first draft…when our friend called. She was disheartened.

Five segments in, her new serial is selling so poorly that she can barely drive herself to finish the tale. She tells us now, she thinks serials are overdone. People don’t want to buy ‘em, anymore. So, that’s –

(4)   – another interesting fact we’ve recently discovered. My but life is full of lessons, isn’t it?

Watching: From Dusk Till Dawn the Series. We enjoyed the pilot. Now it’s time to see if the rest of it’s any good.

Reading: Unsolicited by Julie Kaewert. It’s “A Booklover’s Mystery” and how can we lose? We like mysteries, we love books, and we think we’ll have a good time.

You have a good time, too. We’ll see you next month.

July went out like a lion...

…and August is entering like one, too. Weather-wise, that is. We're not being stalked by actual jungle animals. As we write this today, lightning is flashing and thunder is booming and we’re well aware this post only goes up if the computer doesn’t go down. Yep, we’re old school, meaning we use a computer that’s plugged into a wall socket. So we’re crossing fingers but prepared for the worse.

 That’s not a bad life philosophy, either, even if it’s balanced toward the negative side of things. Outside the office window, the sky is black and threatening and gorgeous. We love to look outside when the weather is like this. (Look outside, not be outside.)  Of course, it’s probably not the best idea to be working on a plugged-in machine at this particular moment so maybe we’ll finish the rest of the blog with pen and paper before we transfer the words to Weebly.

 We’ve had a few busy weeks of late. Visitors have been staying with us for much of the last three weeks, including some pretty time-intensive but wonderful tiny visitors, and we’re exhausted.  During this same time, we also approved the Spanish version of After Things Went Bad (sí, es verdad!) and our latest novel-which-must-not-be-named was swept up by Amazon’s algorithms and became a short time, baby best-seller…well, a “best seller” by our standards. Our standards, as you must know by now, are pretty darned low, but none of our other novels have sold 1,000 copies in two weeks so we’ll take it.

We have a few other things to discuss – we have one writing friend who says we simply must start a mailing list but we don’t know if we want the hassle – and we have another writing buddy who says we simply must write a serial in the Charles Dickens’ fashion. She says this serial will make us rich if it includes (a) romance; (b) sex; a virgin, preferably female; and (d) a billionaire, who may or may not be a vampire but it must absolutely NOT feature (f) a virginal female billionaire vampire. Which kind of disappoints us because, now, that’s the story we want to write.

Watching: Fred Ward in Cast a Deadly Spell. F.W. plays Phil Lovecraft, a hard-boiled dick in the 1940s, battling supernatural forces of evil. Julianne Moore is in the movie, too, playing the femme fatale. Our local library has a VHS copy (you remember VHS, don’t you?), and it’s holding for us as we speak. Both of our team loved Fred in Tremors and Remo Williams, while half of us loves everything Lovecraftian. How can this not be fun?
 
Reading: Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives. The team member who doesn't own every Lovecraft collection ever just happens to think Levin has the goods when it comes to writing. Both of us had read Wives before but it had been several years -- and this looks-like-new Fawcett paperback (pub date 1973) showed up at the library's used book sale for a dime. We're halfway in and, so far, it's better than we remember.

Quer comprar nossas histórias?

...or, if Google's English-to-Portuguese translation service is correct, Wanna buy our stories?
 
Deciding it might be fun to spin old straw into new gold, we listed four of our stories on Bablecube. Bablecube states that their site provides the “easiest way for book publishers and authors to team up with translators and sell their books in multiple languages globally”, and it really was fairly easy for us. It works like this: A publisher or author lists a book on the Babelcube site. A translator searches the site until he or she finds a book that might sell to a non-English-speaking audience, and they then contact the author. If everybody likes everybody, an agreement is made between the parties.
 
The electronic contract is lengthy but understandable, without a heavy dose of lawyerese, and it gives Babelcube an exclusive license to sell the translated version for five years. Until the book (or, in this case, story collection) makes some serious money, the translator gets the biggest piece of the net.  The author may get a smaller cut but there's a sweetener for the people who created the story.  This is a "work-for-hire" deal for the translator and the author continues to hold all copyrights. After five years, should the writer so choose, they can kill the deal and keep the translated version as their own.
 
Overall, there didn't seem to be too many negatives that we could see. The whole thing sounded like fun, in a vague kind of non-fun way,  and not a lot of work (for us), so we put up a few stories and waited to see if anyone was interested in playing in our sandbox. In less than a week, a Spanish translator contacted us about the shortest of the offerings -- After Things Went Bad. When we reviewed her bona fides, she was more than qualified to do this kind of thing, so we signed our contract.  A day or so later, a Portuguese translator contacted about 'Things', too...and she also carried all the ups-and-extras you'd want in someone translating your work, so we signed that contract, too.
 
As part of the deal, the translator is to provide the first ten pages of a story for the author's approval. Our Portuguese-translating partner was the first to send in her ten pages, and we got them, and we looked at them, and....
 
It turns out, neither of us can read Portuguese. This wasn't a surprise, just in case you think the Arizona sun has been beating upon our respective noggins a little too fiercely, but it did mean we had to find someone who could understand the language. Which we did, finally, and they liked what they were seeing with small caveats -- did you know there's a difference between Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal Portuguese? Oh, you fibber, you did not -- and our translator was lovely and receptive to changes and everything came together. You can find this edition right here or in some 300-other locations. Sooner or later, we hope to make a few euros.
 
And, then, the other day, we received the first ten pages of the Spanish version of 'Things'. It turns out, neither of us can read Spanish, either....

Reading: Dancing Days by V.J. Chambers. It's not only interesting, it's free, and who can resist a synopsis that starts with, "If Hogwarts were more like Woodstock, and Voldemort was your childhood sweetheart turned abusive boyfriend..."
 
Watching: We're so torn. The new Robocop, with Joel Kinnaman? Non-Stop, with Liam Neeson? Jack Ryan, with Chris Pine? It needs to be fast, exciting, and not beyond-stupid. Oh, maybe we'll just go with The Lego Movie....

Wanna trade some underwear? Because...

…we’re here if you need, like, twenty-five bucks to help with financing your next clothes-swapping venture. It won’t be our first time.

What happened was this: Kiva.org has recently been knocking on our e-door, wanting to know if we’ll chip in a few dollars for a new next micro-loan. We’d ignored their requests for a few weeks but, with the new novel in good shape, we decided to catch up with a few of our past obligations.  When it came to K.org., we were feeling a little punchy as we went through their list of candidates. We decided we’d choose our next worthy recipient by (a) their story, as presented by Kiva, and (b) the outside temperature in their part of the word. Since it’s been a little hot here, we wanted to help fund someone who was sweating as much as we were.

Finding someone who met criteria #2 was more time-consuming than you might have imagined but, at the Turner house, we’re willing to take the time to get things right. Besides, there’s just nothing on t.v. these days.

Today –you’re reading this on June 1st,  right? – the temp in our little town is hitting 90 degrees Fahrenheit (or 32.2222 Celsius, if you want to go all Rest-of-the-World on us), if WeatherBug can be believed. Coincidentally, in the little village of Azatamut, Armenia, it’s expected to top out at 88 degrees Fahrenheit (or 31.1111 Celsius, if you reside in Armenia but can’t be bothered to go outside and check), but it’s a tad more humid there so, overall, we feel we’ve found our winner. Her name is Gayane.

It’s Gayane’s picture you’ll see in the upper left corner. In our Azatamut research, we discovered more than just the day’s temperature. We’ve learned that less than 2,000 people live in the village; there are no houses for sale there and we couldn’t find any apartments to rent, either; a Big Mac will cost a villager a fast $3.61 (or $2.64 Euro); and the village rests in the province of Tavush. Tavush sounds heavenly, with crystal springs and gorgeous lakes and mountains and mountains of virgin woods. While a resident may occasionally step over a discarded McDonald’s burger wrapper, it’s nearly idyllic.

It is in this modern Eden that, per Kiva, Gayane “rents a small store where she has been trading woman's clothing and underwear for a year.” We don’t have any idea how an underwear swap is profitable – volume! – or how you first approach your friends and neighbors with the idea, but we absolutely admire Gayane for thinking outside of the box. Because, admit it, you know you weren't coming up with this fresh, new concept.

And how is your day going?

Reading: Amped by Rob Lopez. Rob has taken some long strides with his writing and we're impressed. This story is a great start to his X-Troop series and, at 99-cents, how can you lose? But, Rob, man, each chapter averages less than five pages. (The good news? There’s 11 chapters!) That’s very James Patterson of you.

Watching: Tonight, we’re trying Felicia Day and The Guild, because Felicia Day makes Supernatural a little bit better so this might be good, too. Plus, Netflix has six seasons of the show available so, if we enjoy it, we can cut back on watching the Armenian Weather Channel.