Lynn Schneider's Blog, page 9

Malapropisms for a Monday Morning

A malapropism is the (usually) unintentionally humorous misuse or distortion of a word or phrase. It includes the use of a word which sounds somewhat like the one intended but very wrong in the context. This is one of the funniest vehicles to portray a character who is clueless or misinformed.

The terms malapropism and the earlier variant malaprop come from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals, and in particular the character Mrs. Malaprop. Sheridan presumably named his character Mrs. Malaprop, who frequently misspoke (to great comic effect), in joking reference to the word malapropos.

The alternative term “Dogberryism” comes from the 1598 Shakespearean play Much Ado About Nothing in which the character Dogberry produces many malapropisms with humorous effect.

So the malapropism has been around for a few hundred years or so, and is still as populace as ever!

Here are some by famous (sort of) people:

“Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.” (Dan Quayle)
“We cannot let terrorists and rogue nations hold this nation hostile or hold our allies hostile.” (George W. Bush)
“It is beyond my apprehension.” (Danny Ozark, baseball team manager)
“This is unparalyzed in our state’s history.” (Gib Lewis, Texas Speaker of the House)
“Gentlemen, get this straight once and for all—the policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.” (Richard Daley, former Chicago mayor)
“He was a man of great statue.” (Thomas Menino, Boston mayor)

Ringo Starr was famous for his malapropisms which became Beatle’s songs:

“Tomorrow never knows”
“It’s Been a Hard Days Night”
“Eight Days a Week”

 Archie Bunker was known for malapropisms of all kinds:

“A witness shall not bear falsies against thy neighbor.”
“The hookeries and massageries…the whole world is turning into a regular Sodom and Glocca Morra.”
“Off-the-docks Jews.”
“A woman doctor is only good for women’s problems…like your groinocology.”
“I ain’t a man of carnival instinctuals like you.”
“All girls go cockeyed during pooberescency.”
“A menstrual show.” (minstrel)
“Irene Lorenzo, Queen of the Women’s Lubrication Movement.”
“Buy one of them battery operated transvestite radios.”
“In her elastic stockings, next to her very close veins.”
“Last will and tentacle…”
“Patience is a virgin.”
“A Polack art exhibit!” (Jackson Pollock)
“As youse people say, Sh-boom.” (Shalom)
“A kuzeeknee.” (zucchini)
“In closing, I’d like to say Molotov!” (Mazel Tov)

The Sopranos:

“He was prostate with grief.” (Tony Soprano)
“Create a little dysentery among the ranks.” (Christopher Moltisanti) 
“He could technically not have penisary contact with her volvo.” (Tony Soprano to Jennifer Melfi)
“There’s no stigmata connected with going to a shrink.” (Carmine Lupertazzi Jr.) 

Ricky (Robb Wells) from Trailer Park Boys has many well known malapropisms, known by fans of the show as “Rickyisms”. Here are a few:

“Get two birds stoned at once.”
“Worst case ontario.”
“I’m not a pessimist, I’m an optometrist.”
“Survival of the fitness.”
“Passed with flying carpets.”
“What comes around, is all around.”
“It’s clear to see who makes the pants here.”
“Tempus fuck it.” (Tempus fugit)
“It doesn’t take rocket appliances…”

Of unknown origin:

“He had to use a fire distinguisher.”
“Dad says the monster is just a pigment of my imagination.”
“That looks like an expensive pendulum around that man’s neck.”
“Good punctuation means not to be late.”
“He’s a wolf in cheap clothing.”
“Michelangelo painted the Sixteenth Chapel.”
“My sister has extra-century perception.”
“’Don’t’ is a contraption.”
“Flying saucers are just an optical conclusion.”
“A rolling stone gathers no moths.”
“Their father was some kind of civil serpent.”
“The flood damage was so bad they had to evaporate the city.”
“Well, that was a cliff-dweller!”

As coined by various members of my family:

“He must be rich, he lives in a high-rise condom.”
“She went to an ivy-covered college.”
“He plays the cello in the Philharmonica.”
“He has to have surgery on his coroded artery.”

Got a favorite malapropism to contribute?

 

 

 

 

 

 

4 Blog Updates, 1 Household Hint and A Song

(Originally I planned to include three updates to previous blogs. But then something really surprising happened, so it’s four blogs to update.)

Blog Update #1. Last week I blogged about the book on writing, Spunk & Bite by Arthur Plotikin and Mr. Plotkin himself commented on it! In that post, I had noted twelve words, the meanings of which I wasn’t sure, from The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. This week I am re-reading Freedom, Mr. Franzen’s most recent novel. Naturally, I’m finding more words that are I’m not familiar with, and since I am reading on my Kindle, I note it (handy Kindle feature) so I can look up those words later, and re-examine the sentences in which they appear.

As Mr. Plotkin says: “What if a word is likely to be outside the reader’s active or half-known vocabulary? Then even undefined it should lend some special aura, some majesty or exoticism, to the context.” So even if the reader couldn’t give the exact meaning of a word, the sentence in which it appears is crafted such that he still gets it.

This was a really big deal to me, that Mr. Plotkin commented on my post.

Blog update #2. I reviewed the excerpts from the finalists in the ABNA 2012 Contest in both the General and Young Adult Fiction categories. I did not predict correctly in the General category but in the Young Adult, I did.

A Beautiful Land by Alan Averill wins for General Fiction. It started out with a good hook but ended with a bad simile, the one about the Poe boarder.

But my pick for best Young Adult did win, On Little Wings by Regina Sirois. And the really exciting thing (to me) was that this author actually found the review and commented on my post. Think my post had anything to do with her winning? I doubt it, but I’m glad for her. It’s a good story.

Last year, I was 0-for-2. This year at least I got one right. Congratulations to both winners. What an accomplishment!

Blog update #3. Last October, I published The 24 Most Annoying Phrases for 2011 but I need to bump that up to 25. This phrase has been in use for a while, so it still applies to the year 2011.

Reach out!

This is how you make initial contact with someone in business-speak. You can reach out to someone in many ways: phone call, e-mail, instant message, or just bumping into the person who needs to be reached out to in the salad bar line at the cafeteria. Probably want to skip the rest room for any serious reaching out, but anywhere else is fine.

This phrase is so annoying that I made a solemn vow never to let these two words fall from my lips, consecutively, in the same sentence. Other assemblies of the two words in the same sentence are not considered offensive as long as there is at least one word between “reach” and “out”.

Alas. I was once upon a time on some sort of conference call and after much reaching out was being attempted by others, and before I had the proper amount of time to correctly formulate my thoughts, I heard the phrase “reach out” come out of my mouth. I had said it. Gagh! I have yet to forgive myself for it. I will go to my grave knowing that I once said “reach out” and meant it. (It’s perfectly okay to say it if you are being sarcastic or joking around, but if you say it and mean it, this is a vile happening indeed.)

One commenter on the post mentioned this phrase should probably be included in the list and I realized he was absolutely right, that this is one of the worst offenders and yet I had mistakenly omitted it. My apologies, Reach Out, for not including you, and kudos to you for being one of the most ridiculous, silly, meaningless buzzphrases of all!

Blog update #4. I once wrote a blog about marketing strategies that I didn’t think worked and one of them was the Jos A Banks “Buy 1 get 4 Free!” advertising methodology. They recently sent four coupons to my husband “in honor of his birthday”. How they got that information, I don’t know.  

Yippee! Each coupon was for $25 off on a $125 purchase. Okay, that’s nice. And there are four coupons remember. Or instead, says Jos, take $100 off a $500 purchase! But wait, that’s, uh, yeah, that’s 4 times $25 and 4 times $125… Got it! Obviously they think people can’t multiply. Come on, Jos, your customer base is buying cashmere coats and merino wool suits and silk ties. Which is a real good indicator that they aren’t Joe The Plumber and probably are educated and affluent and they can multiply a couple of numbers by 4. Geesh. It isn’t even insulting, it’s just stupid on their part.   

Household Hint. The e-cloth! Found in Real Simple magazine, this is a great way to clean up. These cloths contain millions of tiny fibers which supposedly grab on to all kinds of household gunk and remove it. You can clean anything with just water. Tile, showers, porcelain, glass and there’s even an eCloth for polishing your wine glasses. There are packs for the kitchen, for the bath, for the car, or “all purpose” eCloths. Dust cloths are used dry, all the others use plain water. No more chemicals. It’s fast and it works.

I have been trying to find a way to clean black granite for years – Voila! The eCloth was the solution. Highly recommended.

A great song. Coast by Eliza Gilkyson. It plays regularly on my Emmy Lou Harris Pandora station. Listen to how beautiful it is, how melancholy. Very moving.

12 Words I Had to Look Up While Reading The Corrections

This is not a book review, but I recently read (yet another) “How To Write Real Good” book by Arthur Plotnik. This one is called Spunk & Bite, a play on the title of another How To book called Elements of Style by Strunk and White, published in 1918’s, which makes it, well, to be kind, geriatric.

Elements of Style was a rather rigid set of rules about what not to do.  Do not affect a breezy manner. Do not inject opinion. Do not use foreign phrases. Do not prefer the offbeat rather than the standard. Do not, do not, do not.

One Do Not is to use words which will be unfamiliar to the vast majority of readers, those “big words” with more than two or three syllables and with which we may not have knowledge of their meanings. There is a lot of truth in this, that an author might not want to offput his audience by using a lot of verbiage which only demonstrates how well that author has mastered the English language. In other words, he’s a show off.

Jonathan Franzen contends that counter to the idea that “difficulty tends to signal excellence”, the writer must connect with readers in exchange for their commitment of time and attention to his work.

Yet Franzen himself does this very thing. Take his novel The Corrections, which I just finished reading for the second time. I found these examples (and more) of words that I either was not sure of or had no idea as to their meaning. (Italics indicates examples in The Corrections.)

 

Noblesse oblige – as if noblesse oblige. (I had a vague idea of what this meant, but wanted to bolster my confidence a little in order to use it without incurring smirks of condescension from others.)

A French phrase meaning “nobility obliges”. To imply that with wealth, power and prestige come responsibility. Sometimes used derisively, in condescension or hypocritical social responsibility. The term is sometimes applied, in American English especially, to suggest an obligation for the more fortunate to help the less fortunate.

“Certain persons in politics need not fear being cast into a perception of noblesse oblige.”

 

Misanthropy – misanthropy and sourness. (I am a little reluctant to admit I had to look up the work “misanthropy” which I felt I should already know, but wanted a better explanation.)

A hatred, dislike or distrust of humankind.

“Dude, whenever I go to a Wal-mart, I get this totally weird feeling of, like, misanthropy.”

 

Intransigently – folded her arms intransigently.

In a manner that is stern and indicates refusal to agree or compromise, inflexible.

“Certain members of the House of Representatives are motivated to behave intransigently.”

 

Invidious – he could already hear her invidious descants on the topic of…

Intension to create ill will or give offense; hateful. Offensively or unfairly discriminating or injurious. Tending to cause animosity, resentment or envy.

“Chill, woman.  Everyone has to go through the body scan so no need to be overly invidious here.”

 

Pullulating  - he considered waiting for a less populated [elevator] car, a ride less pullulating with mediocrity and body smells.

To breed, produce, increase rapidly, swarm or teem.

“Facebook is no longer a social network considered desirable by the Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers since it is pullulating with old people.”

 

Reverb – absolutely no reverb on a full elevator.

Rebound. If there is no reverb, there is nowhere to go, no escape, trapped, doomed, claustrophobized.

“Wow, I thought I was toast. Came down with a really bad case of The Plague, but I did a complete reverb.”

 

Riparian – with their damp hair they looked riparian.

Situated or dwelling on the bank of a river or other body of water.

“That shit we used to put on our hair in the sixties? That looked riparian and now they’re doing it again.”

 

Deliquescence – slushy ferric salts succumbing to their own deliquescence. (This refers to a man’s hobby, an ill-maintained basement laboratory.)

To become liquid by absorbing moisture from the air, to melt away.

I tried but I cannot think of a sentence which takes advantage of this word.

 

Diurnality – diurnality yielded to a raw continuum of hours.

Behavior, plant or animal, characterized by activity during the day and sleeping at night.

“Man, my diurnality is seriously messed up since I’ve become a narcoleptic.”

 

Hectoring – her e-mails had been hectoring.

To act in a blustering, domineering or bullying manner.

“So, I’m like, whatever, and she sighs about a million times and I’m like, you are so totally hectoring me here!”

 

Plangent – her voice was plangent.

A loud, deep sound, resonant, mournful.

“Dude, what’s with the plangent tone? You sound like such a loser.”

 

Semaphoring – inmates semaphoring, waving their arms like traffic cops.

A system of signaling, usually with special flags held in each hand and various positions of the arms indicate specific letters or numbers.

“The Kardashian Mom is on Oprah and your semaphoring is blocking my view.”

 

I recommend Spunk & Bite. It is fun to read, the writing fresh and the ideas very usable. It is one of the best I’ve read. You can find it here.

Are you 50+? Then NBC Doesn’t Want You!

In May, NBC decided not to renew the series “Harry’s Law”. Why do you suppose they did that? Was it because no one watched it? No, that wasn’t the reason. It was the second most-watched series on NBC, 8.8 million viewers, just under the 9 million viewers who watched the first most-watched “Smash”. Well, then, why would they have cancelled it? Isn’t the show’s popularity what appeals to networks? Well, yes and no.

Don’t networks care that a lot of people are watching their shows? That depends on the advertisiers. Don’t advertisers care that a lot of people are watching the shows wherein they air their commercials? Yes. As long as you are between the ages of 18 and 49. Otherwise, not so much.

Networks kiss the rings of advertisers, so advertisers determine what we watch on TV. And they (these esteemed “Advertisers”) don’t give a rat’s ass if every single person 50 years of age and older is watching a program or not. They don’t want us. They want the younger crowd. So that would seem to say, “Seniors, suck it up! Learn to love what the demographic that we care about is watching. You are just too damn old to matter to us any longer.”

One NBC executive had the nerve (oh how I’d like to use another term here), to say, “Its [Harry’s Law's] audience skewed very old and it is hard to monetize that.”

Monetize this, dipshits.

75% of America’s wealth is controlled by those 55 and older.
We spend nearly $400 billion more than any other generation, each year.
We outspend the average consumer (whoever that is) in categories such as entertainment and dining, gifts and furniture, and these are the types of commercials that generally air during prime time.

Bottom line. We have more money and we spend it.

But advertisers still listen to the Neilsen Company, who has been monitoring what we watch for the last 40+ years or so. It would appear they continue to use the same methodology they did back in the 70’s.

The Neilsen Company is telling advertisers that the only people who matter are under 50. The advertisers are listening to Neilsen, which is a huge mistake, and threatening to pull ads where the demographic is suspect. No advertisers = no show.

The strategy the Neilsen Co. uses is installing a box in a select number of homes. These are the “Neilsen Families” and they are paid for the inconvenience of having their TV viewing privacy violated. I have never been approached by Neilsen to be one of their select “families” nor do I know anyone who has, but I would have told them where they might place their monitoring device, should they have invited me to become a “Neilsen Family”.

“Hello, may I speak to the head of the household?” says Neilsen.

“Speaking,” say I.

“We, at Neilsen, would like to invite you to become a Neilsen Family, and in that way you can take part in our ongoing quest for Accuracy in Television Viewing and aid our clients in determining who is watching what shows, and if they should bother to advertise on said shows or not, which will then result in those advertisers pressuring the TV networks to axe certain programs. And we would be delighted to bestow a small gift upon you and your family for your cooperation in this matter.”

“No way,” say I. And then I would have told them the location where the monitoring device might be deposited.

Click.

That’s the way that conversation would have gone.

Who would agree to do that? The checks they send aren’t generous, the term used is “token”, and anyone who would do it for that paltry money is certainly not the demographic Neilsen is targeting.

The Neilsen Company wants to “identify, message and find your [the Almighty Advertiser’s] most valuable consumers to maximize marketing efficiency”. They also hope to “adjust your strategy, product and/or marketing to better appeal to key consumers”. (Hint: We are not the key consumers of which they so eloquently business-speak.) And finally, they hope to “…identify white-space innovation opportunities based on a proprietary understanding of latent and emerging demand.”

Wow. WTF does all that purposely obfiscating, nonsensical stuff mean? It means basically, we’re screwed. You will watch American Idol and Dancing With the Stars and NCIS and like it. Turn to the AMC channel if you don’t like it, you old farts.

What’ll it be, Mother? The Travel Channel or The Weather Channel?

One of the reasons they say old-timers aren’t worth pursuing as viewers is that everyone knows that brand-loyalty is established between the ages of 18 – 34. Well, I sorta beg to differ on that one. I’ve switched brands lots of times, and I use products that weren’t available back then, and I’ve changed my mind about a lot of stuff so don’t tell me that I have any brand loyalty at all because I don’t. How do we establish brand loyalty for cell phones, and flat screen TVs, and eReaders between the ages of 18 and 34 when they weren’t around then? And never mind that the brands you might have been loyal to, have long been driven out of business anyway?

And another thing. What about all the 18 – 49 year-olds who DVR everything so they can fast-forward through the commercials. Everyone does that, but I’d be willing to bet Baby Boomers do it less than 18 – 49 year-olds.

Here’s the perfect solution. Advertise the products you think we are interested in (even though we’re clearly not), but in your infinite wisdom of what you think makes good business sense, it would fit in quite nicely. And then you can advertise these products on Harry’s Law.

A few products to consider:

The Pride Mobility Go-Go Ultra X 4-wheel Scooter
The Rollator/Transport Chair Walker Combo
The Medlift Economy Full Size Adjustable Bed
Depend® Real Fit Briefs – Discrete Protection (Choose the one which suits your lifestyle)
Poligrip Denture Adhesive (Helps keep food out)
Funeral Pre-planning (Give your family Peace of Mind)
The myriad of drugs marketed on the National News, including (but not limited to) ED helpers, osteoporosis, emphysema and “going and going and going” medications and all the other junk drugs that fix one problem and cause four more.

But give us back Harry’s Law.

I Want My Harry’s Law!

What do you think about this?

ABNA 2012 Young Adult Fiction Reviews

Below are my reviews of the three novels chosen in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award - Young Adult Fiction. This category isn’t too easy for me to review, since many times the stories are quite far out of my realm of reason, as in, who does this appeal to anyway? The answer is clear. Young Adults, those who embraced the thousands of vampire, zombie, and werewolf books, not to mention fairies and angels for those young people who will mature into adults who read inspirational novels.

This year I rather liked two of the three. That would probably be for a couple of reasons including (but not limited to): there were no vampires, there were no zombies, and there were no werewolves. Are they going away finally?

I was majorly intrigued by one, less-majorly but still intrigued by another, and the third was not interesting to me at all, but that’s my genre bigrotry again, as I find it impossible not to be influenced by genre.

The judges have read the entire manuscripts and they usually post a review which tells what the book is about. Then they say what they believe is right or wrong with it, and then (and I wish they wouldn’t do this) they will say if it is their pick for the winner. The winners are chosen by the voters, but still, I wonder how much the votes will be influenced by what the reviewers have said.

Out of Nowhere by Rebecca Phillips. The first line:

I wasn’t sure what would kill me first—the nagging pain in my head or Dr. Kapur.

It’s a first line that is okay, but after further reading, it seems contrived. The narrator borders on hypochondria so in hindsight, the sentence is an exaggeration and is probably meant to be a good hook. I felt marginally cheated. Riley’s father died unexpectedly while microwaving a plate of lasagna a few years back, and she is not dealing with it well, and can’t walk on the spot in the  kitchen where he had fallen. It is also apparent that she is a loving sister to her seventeen-month old half-brother, by a man who is in and out, but mostly out, of her mother’s life. She disapproves of him thoroughly. It is well-written and I did like the author’s voice. But based on this excerpt, which is all I have, I would have to say it was only marginally interesting to me. It could get better but then the job of the author is to hook me immediately.

On Little Wings by Regina Sirois. The first line:

The DNA of mice and humans is 98% identical.

I like it. I liked the whole first paragraph. I found the first paragraph to be funny and witty, and even though it didn’t really tell me about the story to come, I was very much hooked and wanted to read on. 

Jennifer finds an old photo of a woman who looks uncannily like herself, tucked into the back of an old paperback from her mother’s bookshelf. She instinctively knows this woman is someone important to her, but her parents had said they were both only children. I would have liked it better if the revelation hadn’t been quite so dramatic, but turns out, this woman is her mother’s estranged sister, who her mother insists is a terrible person and who killed their mother. Jennifer then goes to see her best friend, to tell her about it. End of excerpt. The backstory of the best friend is well done, unique, an exaggerated ugly duckling scenario which was very entertaining. I liked this, loved the author’s voice. It promises to be a very satisfying story.

Dreamcatchers by Cassandra Griffin. The first line:

Two things occur to me at the same time.

As a first line, it is fine. This wouldn’t be a case of the standard first-sentence hooker because it doesn’t say too much but still, it’s fine. The first paragraph goes on to reveal the two things, an earthquake has happened, and our narrator appears to have amnesia. Uh oh. Not uh oh about these two things, but uh oh that amnesia is so lame. How many books have been written using that sorry clichéd storyline?

The earthquake unlocked the doors to some sort of hospital/mental institution (we aren’t quite sure) so the person with the amnesia was able to excape (though barely) into the night, clad in a hospital gown. She manages to score a blanket and escapes into a very bad neighborhood where she is threatened by a Very Nasty Person. She manages to get away from him by clocking him on the head. It is written in present tense, which I have come to like very much, and flows well. But it reads too much like a teen action flick for me to be able to connect with it too much. This is certainly my particular limitation, but then, I get to do that here.

My pick? Definitely On Little Wings. One out of three reviewers agreed with me. Not a good sign, but I’m sticking with my pick.

ABNA 2012 General Fiction Reviews

The six finalists for the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award have been chosen. Interesting. There are only two categories, general fiction and young adult fiction. The general fiction finalists are all men, and the young adult fiction finalists are all women.

What does that say? Probably nothing.

I read the excerpts of the general fiction entries and they were all good, and all had a hook and all made me wonder what would happen next. But since I don’t have access to the entire manuscripts, I am basing my reviews on the first few chapters of each one.

Then I’m going to predict the winner, based on which I liked best, which is going to be difficult because I liked all three, but didn’t love any of them.

The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill. This starts out with a great first line hook.

Tak can’t answer the phone because the noose is too tight.

Great, I like that. The deal is, Tak has decided to do himself in and has set up this elaborate suicide event, but the ringing phone distracts him. It turns out to be a strange call, but so interesting that Tak decides to put his suicide plans on hold. Next chapter we meet, Samira who is suffering from PTSD and tells her therapist that Tak was her friend from high school, but that he killed himself four years earlier. But wait, he didn’t kill himself, so what’s going on? That’s another hook. That, of course, is the end of the excerpt. It’s interesting that many authors are using present tense, which never used to be done much. I like it. I believe this book is going to veer off into a nearly sci-fi genre, including time travel and alternate realities so I don’t think it will be something I would ultimately be too interested in. And I found a really bad metaphor.

A clock ticks softly from Carrington’s desk, muffled under a pile of paperwork like the beating heart of a boarder in a Poe story.

Do you hate that as much as I do? Classic case of TTH. (Trying Too Hard).

Grace Humiston and the Vanishing by Charles Kelly. This one is a historical mystery which takes place in 1917. It is fiction, but based on the true story of Mary Grace Winterton Humiston.

I like the voice of this author, told in the first person (but not present tense this time) by the sidekick of Grace, who idolizes her investigative methods (not to mention her physical attributes and accoutrements) from afar – he being a bit of an unseemly sort which he readily admits – and Grace being a very much the lady, well-educated, and married. It promises to be a good story, the case of a missing girl known as the White Slave Case. The excerpt ended with Grace being asked by the narrator if she will find the missing girl, to which she replies “Yes. But, I fear, not alive.”

I am curious to know why she felt that way. I believe I would enjoy this book, and I found no distasteful metaphors in the excerpt.

A Chant of Love and Lamentation by Brian Reeves. This had a good opening line too, similar to the first entry.

These are the last minutes of Charlie Kalenhano’s life.

Charlie is on some terrorist mission, perhaps suicide bomber in Hawaii, as part of a plot to regain Hawaiian independence. The excerpt doesn’t explain it. That must come later. It’s well written and I was mildly curious to know if the bomb went off or not, since Charlie had a few problems on his way to detonate the device, which is in the trunk of his cab. Bad weather, a fender bender accident, locking himself out of the car, late to arrive, etc. The excerpt, while good enough, didn’t grab me sufficiently to get me excited about reading the book when it is finally published.

Actually I liked the entries last year better than these, but my pick is Grace Humiston. We’ll see.

Perigee Moon Available on Amazon!

This past week was spent in the final editing of my third book Perigee Moon, and formatting of both the print version and the Kindle version, which went relatively smoothly. The Kindle Direct Publishing Nice People have now provided us with basic instructions on how to do it, and it is easier than it used to be.

You can get the print version of Perigee Moon here.

I learned that making use of the Styles in Word can make ebook formatting a whole lot easier, so I did that. I fixed my styles and created a Table of Contents and had relatively little trouble getting it published. You can get the ebook version for Kindle here for a mere $2.99.

I can’t decide which I prefer. I still like to read a ”real” book once in a while and I go back and forth, between the Kindle and printed books, Amazon and the Public Library.

Once I got the Kindle version published and it looked very good to me, I decided to do the same with my other two books, which had a couple of formatting issues, due to my relative inexperience back then. Well wouldn’t you just know, wouldn’t it figure, that sometimes it works one way and sometimes it works another. I blame Word for this, there is so much crap under the surface of Word, so many options and it seems needlessly complex to me.

I got Whatever Happened to Lily formatted just fine, and is available here in it’s new format, but when I did Second Stories the exact same way, it didn’t quite work. Well, it worked okay, but put an extra space between the paragraphs which I didn’t want. I still haven’t figured it out. It looks okay, but not perfect, so I haven’t uploaded anything for the Kindle for that book yet.

Maddening, that’s what it is.

I check and compare and look at the HTML and can’t find out why it would do that. There are other ways to do it, through other software but the instructions supplied by KDP seemed so straightforward that I had hoped my ebook formatting issues were behind me. Ack! Not so.

Another surprise was in store for me. It takes a few days for a new print book to be listed on the Amazon site so I kept checking each day to see if it had appeared, and guess what I found? Another book called Perigee Moon. This I would have to describe as seriously suckage because I had specifically searched for books with that title when I selected it.

Perigee Moon by Tara Fuller. After a horrific fire claims the life of her mother, seventeen year old Rowan Bliss finds herself in the miniscule town of Ipswich, Massachusetts. It’s here that she meets Alex, a deliciously mysterious boy who holds the key to unlocking her family’s dark secret. As Rowan falls helplessly over the edge for Alex, the secrets that he insists on keeping refuse to be contained. The truth that she uncovers challenges everything she has ever believed. Alex is a witch. And now he’s awakened something within her she never even knew existed. But out of all of this, the one thing Rowan won’t accept is the fact that Alex is destined to die. Rowan must unearth the buried power she harbors within to escape a deadly prophecy, defy the very laws of time, and prevent the hands of fate from taking yet another person she loves.

We’ll call it “The Other Perigee Moon” but I think I will plug it anyway. You can get that book here.

It’s about witches so I guess we won’t be in direct competition but still, it is disappointing.

In other news, next week (Tuesday, May 22) the six finalists for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award 2012 will be announced. I like to read the excerpts from the books chosen and last year I blogged my reviews of each and tried to predict the winner. I wasn’t too successful. Maybe this year will be better.

Baby Boomer Women Are Shibui!

Shibusa (shibui) is a Japanese concept, with no real translation into English (Shibui is the adjective, shibusa the noun.) The people of Japan think of beauty in levels – from blatant, harsh and bold to the ideal beauty of shibusa, which is the type of beauty that involves complexity, the imperfections and patina that only time can bring. A mature beauty, like a vintage wine, a history that is conveyed by the artifact. Understated quiet sophistication.

I can’t think of a word in English that comes close. Elegant? Tasteful? Refined? Dignified? These words all describe aspects of shibusa but don’t really define it. It’s the idea that things get better with age, and that perfection is not as well tolerated as shibusa.

Shibusa is simplicity, implicitness, modesty, silence, naturalness, everydayness and imperfection.

An old rocking chair is shibui.
A “real leather” lazy boy recliner is not shibui.
An old baggy cashmere sweater is shibui.
A 100% polyester “fleece” is not shibui.
Old English aged cheddar is shibui.
Cheez whiz is not shibui.

You get the idea here.

I had the insane notion that us boomer women need to throw off fifty or sixty plus years of age discrimination and embrace the idea of shibusa. Why not? We’ve been calling the shots as to what’s cool for decades, so why should we stop now, just because we’re getting old, and challenged in any number of ways?

Let’s throw away the anti-aging creams, the hair coloring, the gold jewelry, the fake nails, the spikey shoes, the clothes that (let’s face it here) aren’t meant to adorn bodies that have been around almost as long as Cheerios.

At some point we’re going to have to resort to plastic surgery if we want to keep up the charade. You can only hide behind dark glasses, botox injections, turtle necks and big hair for a limited amount of time. After that, it’s the old nip ‘n tuck.

I have lighting in my bathroom that makes me look like I am a decade or two younger. I planned it that way. You know the kind. Like when you go into a really upscale department store and the dressing rooms are all lit softly, dramatically, such that you look really good, instead of those fluorescent abominations in Target. Except for a couple of flaws (which can’t be ignored) the skin tones look perfect; unblemished, smooth and nearly wrinkle-free.

Imagine my surprise when I catch sight of myself in some other venue (even a turned off Smartphone will do the evil deed) and find to my horror that instead of looking like the ageless person I believed myself to be, I do in fact look pretty much like other people my age do.

Never mind photos. I think cameras should be able to calculate the age of the person upon which they are focusing and add the appropriate amount of PhotoShop right there. That way, no embarrassingly awful pictures can be posted on Facebook and to which you have to beg the poster to “please take that down, I hate it!” and to which they reply, “aw, I thought it was cute”. Take the friggin’ thing down before I unfriend you. I don’t care if you’re my daughter or not! Say I.

There’s a 55-year-old woman who is trying out for the Dallas Cowboy’s cheerleading squad. Everyone says, “Imagine that! She’s 55! Doesn’t she look great for 55?” What the hell difference does it make? She’s still 55! She’s got an AARP card! She qualifies for the Bob Evans Senior Meal! She can buy a house in a special gated community because she meets the minimum age requirements!

We baby boomer women need to embrace the concept of shibusa and hopefully convince others to embrace it too. Then our wrinkles and hair of (whatever color it is, I wouldn’t know anymore) and sagging skin would all be shibui, very cool.

So instead of this:

I’m going for this:

35 Aphorisms Written by a Cool French Guy

Recently, I was involved in a discussion about aphorisms, which, simply put, is a saying expressing a belief, usually true. Think, quote of the day.

There are millions of recorded aphorisms, and web sites devoted to them, one in particular I found helpful, in that the aphorisms were categorized based on love, friendship, life, etc. I chose love, thinking, maybe I could blog something about my Perigee Moon character and his rather rocky road to a lasting and fulfilling relationship. I discovered a majority of the aphorisms I particularly liked were authored by a French gent who lived in the sixteen hundreds, so I decided to research him and discuss his aphorisms exclusively.

His name is François de la Rochefoucauld and he was considered the greatest maxim writer of France, a maxim being “a compact expression of a general truth or rule of conduct.”  I believe roughly, maxim = aphorism, or at least they are enough alike that M. de la Rochefoucauld’s maxims appear in nearly every list of popular aphorisms.

Here is a picture of Francois:

Notwithstanding the big hair, he is a comely fellow. Sometimes it’s hard to tell, with the strange getups those dudes used to wear, and the wigs, facial hair, and the rather petulant expressions they all seem to portray which makes me surmise things that aren’t necessarily true.

He had an unremarkable military career of twenty years, and ended up in some court or another, one of those places where they ate, drank and entertained themselves until they were so bored they created some scandal just to relieve the tedium. He was married quite young, to Andree de Vivonne (“who seemed to be an affectionate wife, while not a breath of scandal touched her”) and yet he had relationships with a couple of other ladies as well, so there might have been a bit of dalliance going on there, which was okay for the Ms but not the Mmes. Oh, wasn’t that always the way?

Given the subject of some of his most interesting maxims, I believe it safe to suppose M. de la Rochefoucauld might have been enjoying some strange on the side. But who knows? I could be wrong about it, and thankfully he can’t sue me for slander or defamation of character since he’s been dead for 400 years. Speaking of 400 years, it’s interesting that these aphorisms (or maxims), are as appropriate today as they were then.

Here are 20 of my favorites with snarky comments:

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” We’re watching you, Kim Jong-um, Mr. Current-Supreme-Leader.
“How can we expect another to keep our secret if we cannot keep it ourselves.” You should have read this, Anthony Weiner, before tweeting those jockey shorts pics.
“We hardly find any persons of good sense save those who agree with us.” Just ask a conservative Republican or a liberal Democrat. It’s the one thing upon which they can both agree.
“A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice.”  You’re pretty. My nose is too big. You’re beautiful. My mouth is too small. You’re exquisite. I’m too fat. Okay, you’re right. I guess you’re actually pretty nasty.
“It is the prerogative of great men only to have great defects.” William Jefferson Clinton.
“It is easier to appear worthy of a position one does not hold, than of the office which one fills.” Ohio Governor John Kasich.
“Preserving the health by too strict a regimen is a worrisome malady.” It’s the old joke, where you give up things that are fun to do, and take up things that are not fun to do, and you may not live longer but it will seem like longer. A lot longer.
“Attention to health is life’s greatest hindrance.” Ask any hypochondriac.
“We do not despise all those who have vices, but we despise all those who have not a single virtue.” Rush Limbaugh. Congratulations for having no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
“The greatest miracle of love is the cure of coquetry.” As soon as a couple shares a laundry basket and a bathroom, coquetry is pretty much history, and in its place the willingness to discuss just about anything.
“One may outwit another, but not all the others.” Is this the same as “fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again. “ George W. Bush.
“Some people resemble ballads which are only sung for a certain time.” Remember the Macarena? Think about that, Kim (Kardashian).  
“The world rewards the appearance of merit oftener than merit itself.” Donald Trump comes to mind.
“Those who occupy their minds with small matters, generally become incapable of greatness.” See, Jerry Falwell? Everyone has forgotten about you.
“We all have strength enough to endure the misfortune of others.” We should all think of this one, each time we watch a news report about those affected by natural disasters.
“True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about but few have seen.” That’s because you can’t find true love on Match.com. The odds are as good as being struck by lightning and winning the lottery – in the same day.
“Those who apply themselves too much to little things often become incapable of great ones.” Any person who participates in any capacity to the production of Dancing With the Stars, and this goes double for you, Bruno.
“There are foolish people who recognize their foolishness and use it skillfully.” Paris Hilton.
“The love of justice is simply in the majority of men the fear of suffering injustice.” The NRA.
“Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.” Fox News.

My hope is not to offend any readers; I have probably shown my true colors here, which is a shade of blue-purple. I suspect most are left-leaners anyway, or you wouldn’t have been hanging out here for this long. Am I right?

The following of M. de la Rochefoucauld’s maxims are too insightful to deface with jokes, or references to bad people. I like these. They were written 400 years ago and are as true today as they were then.

“It is a kind of happiness to know how unhappy we must be.”
“In their first passion, women love their lovers; in all the others, they love love.”
“In jealousy there is more of self-love than love.”
“One is never so happy or so unhappy as one fancies.”
“Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.”
 “Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.”
“Everyone blames his memory; no one blames his judgment.”
“There are very few people who are not ashamed of having been in love when they no longer love each other.”
“It is almost always a fault of one who loves not to realize when he ceases to be loved.”
“When a man is in love, he doubts, very often, what he most firmly believes.”
“In jealousy there is more self-love than love.”
“If we resist our passions it is more from their weakness than from our strength.”
“We are more interested in making others believe we are happy than in trying to be happy ourselves.”
“Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans a fire.”
“When a man must force himself to be faithful in his love, this is hardly better than unfaithfulness.”

There are many more of M. de la Rochfoucauld’s aphorisms (maxims), this is a mere sampling. They aren’t platitudes and they aren’t dark sayings. They are packed full of meaning, no wasted words, yet with no loss of substance. I detect some melancholy poetry as well. He was an experienced writer and a deep thinker with a devotion to the romances of chivalry. Each one could be the subject of an entire essay.

5 Blogging Insecurities or Will I Ever Be Freshly Pressed?

I started reading an Elizabeth Berg novel yesterday called Once Upon a Time, There Was You. I’m not sure I should have done it and I will now tell you why I say that.

Ms. Berg is one of the very best women’s fiction authors in the country, in the world, in the universe. That’s merely my opinion but I know a lot of people agree with that statement. I was immediately hooked. There was a prologue about a couple who’d planned to marry, from each of their POVs. They each had second thoughts about the other and misgivings, serious misgivings that they might be doing the wrong thing, but went through with the wedding anyway. They were both in their late thirties and felt it was “time to settle down”.

Fast forward twenty years. They have an eighteen-year-old daughter and guess what? They are now divorced. Not surprising, given their reluctance to go through with the marriage in the first place. A few chapters in and I am still hooked, and I really like the main characters. What a lovely book it’s going to be. And what I really want is to be reading it, instead of writing this blog or editing my own novel.

Reading a Berg novel, while it may not educate you in anything other than great food presentation, or perhaps serve as a tool to demonstrate what really good writing looks like, is vastly entertaining.

Uh. All the insecurities rear their ugly heads.

I won’t ever be as good, I can’t compete, I might as well devote my life to chasing after dust bunnies and finger prints. Is it too late to learn how to cook? Maybe bake a pie? Yeah, probably.

My day is divided into thirds while I babysit for my four-month-old grandson. He is remarkably predictable, and has periods of wake, sleep and eat. Three times during my day, he repeats this cycle and while he sleeps and sometimes while he is awake, I can do things other than tend to him. I promised myself, one period of Elizabeth Berg, one period of editing Perigee Moon and one period of blog writing.

This is period three, blog writing. Speaking of blogging, check out my stats from the beginning of time. Not sure I can keep it up but it sure looks good to see the lovely graph of hits go up and up each month.

And even though I see this steady increase, still my blogging insecurities are ever present.

Here are some of the things I worry about, blog-wise:

Have I remembered to answer everyone’s comment? It is not polite to ignore comments and only if one goes viral is it acceptable to lump one response to several comments. A successful blogger should at least attempt to answer each one individually. I think I may have ignored a couple, but wait, crap. There’s one from last week I forgot about. Well, I’ll respond to that one right now.
Does my latest blog post suck? Does it sound like I just wasn’t in the right mood but it was time so I wrote down just anything? Looking back at some of the earlier ones, I think some of them do, in fact, suck. Some more than others. Some are helpful to writers but boring to non-writers, some are superficially entertaining and have no redeeming value to writers but may appeal to non-writers. Some are vents and some are just whatever happened to inspire me that day, like political rallies or food labels or maligning the Kardashians. Do the writing posts suck, or the non-writing ones? Do they all suck?
Why don’t many bloggers “like” my posts? This is a big deal. If I have more readers now, why doesn’t anyone “like” it? Do they hate it? If they do like it, why don’t they tell me, then I can get those cool emails from WordPress telling me Congratulations! Someone liked your post enough to click the Like button!
Why don’t I get many comments? Is it because my posts aren’t interesting enough, or funny enough, or educational enough? Probably all of the above. I love getting comments! Whenever I see emails from comment-reply@wordpress.com I get euphoric with joy. The email has all the information, the name of the comment and the text. It’s so exciting to see these in my inbox!
Will I ever be Freshly Pressed? This may not be familiar to some readers, but other WordPress bloggers know well what this status symbol does for the old stats. This is when the WordPress gurus themselves find a blog that they consider to be original and worthy of a place on the home page. I have started to follow many blogs based upon their Freshly Pressed status. My personal goal is to achieve this someday. What a feather in the old writing cap that would be. I’m not sure how the individual blogs are picked by the WordPress people, but somehow they find them.

So I wonder. I like to post once a week. Is it better to post a so-so article, or a rather dumb article, or a completely lame article, rather than post nothing at all?

I haven’t been feeling all that funny lately, so I hope the readers I have managed to accumulate stick with me.