Victoria Zigler's Blog: Zigler News, page 124

#Writing Wednesday - February 8th 2017

Are you someone who wants to find time to work on, or take up, a creative hobby? It doesn't matter if it's writing, drawing, or whatever. If this applies to you, here are some tips on how to make time for creativity. Perhaps they can help you find the time to work on some artwork, or write that story you want to write.

When it comes to my own writing, I like the names of my characters to have some meaning for them, and usually choose them carefully. However, sometimes they choose themselves, as
Are you having trouble making your own deadlines? Then take a look at this post on how to train yourself to make your own deadlines. Also, here's why you should still write when everything around you is going to hell... Just in case you need the reminder. These tips on finding your garret may be useful to you too.

Finally, stop "shoulding" on yourself.

#Medieval Monday Index - For #History Lovers

A fellow blogger with a passion for medieval history does a regular feature called "Medieval Monday" on her blog, where she posts some interesting facts about medieval history (as the title of the feature suggests).

I've found these posts interesting, and shared a couple of them in the past. But I'm sure I haven't shared more than a few. So I thought I'd take advantage of the fact she's created a post to act as an index, where you can access all her Medieval Monday posts, and link to that for those of you who may be interested in reading them.

If you want to check it out the Medieval Monday index can be found here.

Tori's January 2017 #Book #Reviews (LBE)

It's time to take a look at what I read in January.

As with the previous posts like this one, if you want to know more about the book, or the author, click on whichever it is you want to learn more about, and it will take you to the appropriate page on Goodreads. Clicking on my rating should take you to my actual Goodreads review for the book in question.

Don't forget: the format I've reviewed may not be the format I read. Also, please remember that I read across multiple genres and age ranges, so you should always check if a book is suitable for the intended reader, especially when children are involved. Sometimes reading the book's description on its Goodreads page will be enough for this, but other times you may need to check elsewhere to figure out the genre and/or recommended reading level.

OK... On to the reviews!

A Quick Bite by Lynsay Sands
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a well-written book, which makes for an enjoyable read. At least, assuming you like vampire themed romances.

Psycho-analysis by Rosemary J. Peel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a well-written collection of creepy stories. The only reason I don't give it the full five stars is because a couple of them feel like they should be expanded on; a couple of the tales feel more like the start of something longer, rather than a full story in their own right. Other than that, however, I think this is an excellent collection of stories, which will appeal to lovers of weird and creepy tales.

Johnny Morris, Bedtime Stories With, by Johnny Morris
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The stories are cute and entertaining, and the way Johnny tells them and does the voices is fantastic!

Tales of the Faie: The Beginning of Days by Diana L. Wicker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a beautifully written collection of tales, which flow together perfectly.

Johnny Morris Reads More Bedtime Stories by Johnny Morris
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Once again, this is a cute and entertaining collection of stories, and the way Johnny reads them and does the voices is fantastic!

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original Screenplay by J.K. Rowling
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
OK... I love this book! Also, I want to find some way of getting my hands on Newt's case and it's contents (if you know me, and have read this book, or seen the movie, you'll understand why). Anyway, the book was awesome, and now I'm even more eager to see the movie than I was before.

Love Bites by Lynsay Sands
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book is an enjoyable read, which is often entertaining, and has a great cast of characters. If you like vampires in your romance novels, you'll want to read this one.

Womble Stories by Elisabeth Beresford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A great collection of stories, which bring back fond memories of watching the Wombles on TV.

The Wombles by Elisabeth Beresford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I only realized afterwards that I'd read this one and the other collection of womble stories I had the wrong way around. It doesn't matter though, since it didn't spoil my enjoyment of the stories; I still loved them, and they still evoked fond memories of watching The Wombles on TV as a child.

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This wasn't a bad read, but it wasn't as exciting as I thought it would be; I didn't feel the sense of urgency I'd have thought would be present in the plot.

Single White Vampire by Lynsay Sands
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is another great addition to the series, though I often found myself wanting to bang the main characters' heads together because of their stubbourness.

Tall, Dark & Hungry by Lynsay Sands
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Once again, this book was a great addition to the series, which would make an excellent addition to the book collection of anyone who enjoys vampire themed paranormal romances.

Sunbolt by Intisar Khanani
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a fast paced and enjoyable read.

Memories of Ash by Intisar Khanani
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book was a great read. The plot moved at a nice pace and kept my attention well, the characters are believable, and the story is interesting. The only thing I was disappointed with was the ending, since I felt it was a bit sudden. I know there's another book to follow this one, but I didn't think everything was as resolved as it should have been, even for a book that's part of a series.

A Bite to Remember by Lynsay Sands
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Possibly the best of the series so far, with a really interesting plot, and a great cast of characters (old and new). An excellent read for those who enjoy vampire themed romances, especially if you also enjoy mysteries.

#Furkid Friday: 6 Facts About My #Degu Days Duo #Books

Throughout February, in place of my usual "Furkid Friday" posts, I'll be sharing some facts about certain animal stories my furry family members have inspired. You may already know these facts, but I thought I'd share them, just in case you don't and are interested. I hope you enjoy these posts.

I'm kicking things off with some facts about my Degu Days Duo.

1. The degus in the stories are based on my actual degus, and were even given their names. At the time the books were released, we still had all four of them. We unfortunately lost Jasper, Jenks, and Jacob, during 2016 (in June, September, and November, respectively) but still have Joshua at the time of this post going live.

2. The pictures on the covers are actual photos of my boys. The photo on "The Great Degu Round-Up" actually contains all four of them, while the one on "A Very Degu Christmas" is of Jacob and Jenks. The quality could be better, but they were the best photos I had of them at the time, and I didn't want to change the covers afterwards. It was suggested, but I refused.

3. The first book in the series was based on the actual chaos that was my attempts at keeping all four degus in one place while my hubby cleaned their cage. We put them in the bath (with the plug in, but no water in it) because the slippery sides made it more difficult for them to jump out, and therefore easier for me to keep them in a small area where I could do a regular headcount unaided. They would still sometimes make a bid for freedom, but it was easier for me to realize and capture the escaping degu than it would have been had they had free run of a large area.

4. I originally only planned to write the one book, but couldn't resist doing their version of the Christmas story that is part of my "Kero's World" series. Hence the addition of the second book after all.

5. My Degu Days Duo books were the first I made available in paperback, because I'd had a request from a reader for paperback versions of those particular books at the time I was deciding which books to make available in paperback first.

6. At the time of this post going live, the only book of mine that has sold more copies than my Degu Days Duo is my stand-alone degu story, Degu's Day Out.

***

Want to buy your own copies of the books in the Degu Days Duo? Or, any of my other books, for that matter.

You can buy all of my books as eBooks from Smashwords, as well as from Barnes & Noble, Apple iBooks, Kobo, and a few other eBook retailers. Alternatively, you can buy them as paperbacks from CreateSpace, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and a couple of other online retailers. They're also available to order from libraries in any format, assuming your library supports this feature, and either already carries them, or is willing to get copies.

R.I.P. Star

Yesterday (Wednesday February 1st 2017) we took our other ratty girl, Star, to the vet, because we noticed she had a lump too, and wanted it checked out. Turned out she had a chest infection, as well as not one, but two, tumours.

She spent last night at the vet, because she found the ride to the vet very stressful, and seemed more relaxed in the vet than she was on the way there, so we wanted to avoid putting her through more trips to and from the vet than necessary, and hoped she'd find spending the night at the vet less stressful than coming home only to have to make the journey back there this morning.

Anyway, she was scheduled to have a chest x-ray today, so that the vet could determine whether surgery to remove the tumors, followed by a course of antibiotics to get rid of the chest infection, was an option for her, or whether it would be better to let her go. Bearing in mind, she wasn't exactly young by rat standards (she would have been two and a half in a few weeks time).

The vet called us this morning to tell us that Stars x-rays looked good - there was no sign of either the infection or tumours having spread enough to be a serious problem that surgery and antibiotics couldn't fix - so there was a good chance surgery would go well for her. Obviously there were still risks (there always are in general, and there are especially with her age, and the fact she was going under anasthetic with a chest infection) but she had a good chance. Since she had a good chance, I gave him permission to go ahead and do the surgery.

Unfortunately, Star didn't make it.

Between the tumours turning out to be worse than they'd looked on the x-ray, the chest infection, her age, and the fact she ended up losing more blood than they'd have liked during the surgery attempt, she died under anasthetic.

I'm trying to take comfort from the fact she's no longer suffering, as well as the fact we did everything we could to give her a chance. Those thoughts aren't helping much though.

I'll miss you, my little superstar.

R.I.P. Star: August 31st 2014 - February 2nd 2017

#Writing Wednesday - February 1st 2017

The reason there hasn't been much in the way of writing reports from me is because there's not much to tell. I've written a couple of poems (one being the one about snowflakes I posted about a week and a half ago) and made some progress on one of the stories I'm working on. That's about it though. I know there are those who will say I'm simply guilty of excuses and the fine art of self sabotage. They'd be right, to a certain extent. Some of it is just me allowing myself to make excuses. Some of the excuses are out of my control though, since I spent a lot of January working to the timetables of others, which does tend to complicate matters. Basically, there is progress, just not much of it. So, while you wait for me to have something worth saying in regards to my own writing, please enjoy the links I've gathered together for you this week.

Not that I have many for you this week, but...

Regardless of what you're writing, you may want to take a look at these three tips for describing eyes in a story.

Also, if you've reached the editing phase with your current writing project, here are ten editing tips that may help you out. They're officially aimed at writers of short stories, but are a great place to start regardless of the length of your work. As a point though, number three may not apply, especially if you write stories for younger readers, where repetition is actually encouraged.

At some point you're going to need to decide the answer to the question, "Does your book need a sequel?" Which is something you can decide at any point during the writing or book production process. As the post explains, it's sometimes fans who will make you think about it, but it's something only you can really answer, and you shouldn't do it if your book doesn't need one and your heart isn't in it.

Finally, if you're interested, here's a list of poetry forms; useful if you write poetry, or want to do so, and potentially interesting if you enjoy reading poetry. Of course, there are poems that break all the rules, and don't fit properly in to any of those... Isn't that the case with all types of writing? But that post is a good one to get you started on identifying types of poetry forms, so I thought I'd share it for anyone interested in checking it out.

R.I.P. Skye

This morning we took our ratty girl, Skye, to the vet. We came home without her.

Her overall health was getting worse: she wasn't as active as she had been, had lost a lot of weight despite the fact we know she was eating, her fur had lost some of its colouring and she was starting to lose some of it, and her bladder control had become poor. On top of that, she'd damaged her leg recently, and we discovered a lump on her chest over the weekend.

Her lump was a cyst they could have probably removed, which was most likely caused by a hormonal shift; it's a regular thing in female rats of a certain age who haven't been spayed. But her overall poor health and weak state - which mostly seemed to just be age catching up with her - made her chances of surviving the procedure so slim it was decided we'd be better off putting her to sleep. After all, just the stress of the vet taking a small sample of the lump to check out what it was seemed to sap her strength, and I know from personal experience that having to have anasthetic takes a lot out of you when you're at full strength, and is even harder to deal with when you aren't. It hurts to do, but letting her go now saved a lot of stress and suffering for everyone, and was the kindest option. So, that's what we did.

We will miss you, sweet ratty girl.

R.I.P. Skye: August 31st 2014 - January 31st 2017

January 2017 #TV Talk And #Movie Mutterings

It's time for this month's new to me movies post, which will contain movies from December too, since not only did I not watch many new to me movies during December... Or January, for that matter... But I had a lot of other stuff I wanted to post about, so I decided to just keep the couple of movies I watched last month to go in a post with this month's new to me movies. I had planned on there being more movies being reviewed, since I'd planned to watch all my new birthday and Christmas DVDs during January, but life happened, and I didn't end up doing what I'd planned to do.

Anyway...

As with the previous posts like this one, just click on the movie titles to go to a page where you can find out more details about the movie in question; the movie title links will usually take you to a page on IMDB.

OK...

Jingle All The Way 2 (2014 movie/video):
Though it wasn't absolutely amazing, this was a pretty good movie, with several funny scenes; a great one for lovers of holiday themed comedies, in my opinion. I give this movie four out of five stars.

Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever (2014 TV movie):
I thought this would be an entertaining movie. I mean, come on, it's a holiday movie where the star is an animal. But, to be perfectly honest, I thought it was rubbish. OK, there were a couple of entertaining scenes, but that's about all it had going for it. I only watched the whole thing so I could honestly say I'd done so, even though I was tempted to stop watching before I was even a quarter of the way in to the movie. I nearly gave it only one star, but - for the sake of the few scenes that actually were entertaining - I give this movie two out of five stars.

In The Heart Of The Sea (2015 movie):
I've read "Moby Dick" so was interested to see this one. It turned out to be a pretty good movie. Not absolutely amazing, but worth watching, in my opinion. As a warning though, it's not one for the squeemish, or for those with weak stomaches. Consider yourself warned. Anyway, I give this movie four out of five stars.

Stardust (2007 movie):
Now this movie, which I didn't realize at first was based on a book, I haven't read the book for. Although, after watching the movie, I now want to read it. I stumbled upon this movie by accident, having turned the TV on just right to catch a scene or two, which I liked the look of, and made me want to see when it would be on again, so I could watch it from the start. I've actually been meaning to watch this one since Halloween, but took a while to get around to it. I'm glad I did so eventually though, because I thought it was a fantastic movie. It would have made a great one to watch around Halloween, but I enjoyed it well enough when I saw it between Christmas and the new year. There are several scenes that aren't for the squeemish though, just to warn you. I give this movie five out of five stars.

The Last Dragonslayer (2016 TV movie):
I'm torn on this one. On the one hand it was a pretty good movie, with several entertaining scenes, and an interesting plot. On the other hand, they seemed to focus more on the comedy aspect, and less on the fantasy adventure, and I felt like they were so busy trying to be funny that they forgot everything else. I haven't read the book, so I can't say if the book was the same. However, I can tell you that I give this movie three out of five stars.

Ant-Man (2015 movie):
This was a really good movie. It was action-packed, and had several entertaining scenes. It's not one of those amazing movies I'm going to be desperate to watch over and over again, so it won't be making its way in to my list of favourites. But it was really good. I give this movie four out of five stars.

My Reader Interview On Library Of Erana - #AmReading

I strongly believe that a writer should be a reader first and foremost, and anyone who has been following me for any length of time will know I'm an avid reader. For this reason, I participated in a reader interview over on the blog of fellow author, Alex Butcher, to give everyone a peek in to some of my habits and preferences when it comes to reading.

The interview went live on Alex's blog yesterday. So, if you'd like to read it, just click here.

When you've read my interview, take a look around. Alex has some excellent interviews on her blog - reader and otherwise - as well as other great posts. Plus, if you're a fan of fantasy with an adult theme to it, you may want to check out her books.

#Furkid Friday: Mollie The #Chinchilla On Organization And Home Repairs

Um... Hi everyone. This is Mollie the chinchilla.

The human caretakers have been doing what they call "organizing" a lot lately. Personally, what I call it is "annoying" (not to mention often noisy). I mean, how's a chinchilla supposed to get her beauty sleep in with all that moving things around, back and forth carrying things to various places, and all those bumping and banging noises that go along with it all? Chinchillas are nocturnal creatures... Don't these humans know the meaning of the word nocturnal?

Not to mention, there have been strange humans coming in and out poking around and muttering things that the human caretakers seem to understand, but which make no sense to us rodent types... Something about boilers and heating systems, and something else about windows. I don't understand any of it, personally. All I know is that the humans are making more noise than we like, and me and Maizie wish they'd let us sleep in peace.

A couple of strange humans even walked out with our freezer yesterday! I mean, sure, the human caretakers hadn't been using it for at least a little while. But we couldn't believe it when they just stood there and watched while two other humans walked out carrying it. Whatever next?

The human caretakers say hopefully it will all be sorted soon, and Maizie and I can get back to getting our beauty sleep in each day. But that's not much comfort, especially when they use words like "hopefully" when saying it.

Well, I suppose all we can do for now is put up with it, and cross our paws that it really will be over with soon, and that no strange human visitors walk out of here with anything that belongs to us rodent types. I'm seriously considering biting anyone who tries to do that. I know we're not supposed to bite, but my rodent siblings and I have all agreed that biting would be acceptable if humans start trying to steal our stuff. Consider yourself warned!

Squeak soon,
Mollie