Jane Thomson's Blog: But I'm Beootiful!, page 26

Tom would love to hear from you

Reblogged from notesfromthewaitingroom:

Hi everyone

Jo here, Tom's niece, gatecrashing his blog again!

Tom is back at the Lar working very hard at getting better. He's medically stable, well looked after but rehabilitation is slow and frustrating. Tom's mind is sharp as a razor as ever, but he's frustratingly not able to type, read or use the computer. However, he'd LOVE to hear your messages, words of support, notes or anything else.

Read more… 37 more words

Send a message of support to Tom - maybe a hug, a joke, whatever you can!

The Sorcerer’s Tampon and other mysteries

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Lady Ermenegilda stood alone in the Chamber of Eternal Night, the light of an elaborately carved chandelier catching her dusty crewcut and faint ginger moustache..

“CUT.”

….catching her cascading chestnut waves and honey-coloured skin.

“Your time has come, Lord of Sorcerers.”  She drew forth a high-powered plasma-rifle and -

“CUT.  They don’t have high-powered plasma rifles!”

“Yes they do! This is set in the 30th Millennium.  What do you think they have? Swords?”

“Exactly.”

….drew forth the ancient blade of the Queens of Erith, and held it high.

“Fight me, and we will see which is the strongest, good or evil.”

“I will not fight you,” said the Lord of Sorcerers, bending down to adjust the strap of one stiletto, blonde curls falling disarmingly over one long-lashed -

“Hold it!  The Lord of Sorcerers isn’t a cross-dresser!  And he’s a brunette.  Evil, dark.  Good, blonde.  Got it?” 

“He could be.  How come evil sorcerers never show their feminine side.  I think it’s about time cross-dressers got equal time with”

“SHUTUP!’

“Then fight we shall, and I shall crush you like the weak human slave that you are!” thundered the Lord of Sorcerers, and rising from his throne of ancient power he drew his own weapon, a lethal cannister of nerve gas which he had been developing all along for this very eventuality deep in the chasms of his -

“NO. There is NO nerve gas!”

..drew the blood-red axe of Zrognum with which he had killed Lady Ermenegilda’s mother so many years before.

And as they stood poised for battle, a paleness overcame Lady Ermenegilda, and a strange weariness.  She sank to the black marble floor, a spreading red stain darkening her white silk dress.  The Lord towered over her, exulting in his strength and power.

“Yes, kneel and die, Lady.  For my magic is mighty yet.  Fall at my feet, and be destroyed!”

“Wait!” said the Lady Ermenegilda, “This is unfair. I have but got my period.  Stay but a moment and I will take two ponstan tablets -”

“NO. Fantasy heroines do not have periods.”

“Yes they do. What about when Sansa has her first bleed in Game of Thrones? What about – ”

“NO THEY DON’T.  Not in the middle of important fights.”

“Anyway…”

But as he towered above her, gloating, Lady Ermenegilda summoned all her waning strength and thrust, straight to the heart of darkness…

“Missed!”

“NO she didn’t!”

A groan  escaped his livid lips, a thousand banshees breaking loose of the torments of Hell.  The Lord of Sorcery doubled up, clutching his belly.

“It is I who have destroyed you, and with you, all the evil that you brought into this fair world,”

The Lady Ermenegilda stood tall and straight, a glory upon her.

“No,” said the Lord, dragging himself slowly to the great oaken doors, “I’m not actually dying. It is just that I ate half a cow at dinner, and I REALLY need to go to -”

OK that’s it.  I’ve had it with you.  We just can’t work together. I’m off.  Maybe to make Game of Thrones.  Who knows.  Good luck with your screenwriting career.  IF you have one after today. Ha!

To celebrate the fact that my novel, Deeper, is on Amazon FREE for ONE MORE DAY , I’m going to write a tale of dark fantasy each day as the moon sinks below the gum trees!  Four down, one to go.  Join me if you feel in a fey mood, and I’ll link.  YES, gloated the Lord of Sorcery, 650 people have already downloaded Deeper – guess the blurb must be good if nothing else!!!

Unfamiliar

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I hang in the air above the burning of her.  I feel..responsible.  But hungry.  Because, you know, that’s crows for you.  Intelligent, we are, but not too compassionate, we can’t afford to be.

I often wonder why these humans do the things they do.  What do they think will come of it, setting light to an old woman in the marketplace, sending her body up in smoke and ashes to appease – who?  And they say that we crows are fond of battlefields.  We are not the ones who make them.

Well.  From this distance, I can hardly hear her cries, thin as an old woman’s must be.  I call goodbye.  We were friends, she and I.  She threw me scraps of meat and bread, and I sat on her skin and bone arm, watching out for her.  They said she flew away to a coven in the hills, on her broom of matted brush, of a midsummer night.  She couldn’t even make it to the door, sometimes, to pee in the cabbages under the moonlight.

Anyway, enough of that.  I cannot cry, with my round grey eye.

My familiar is waiting, in his long black gown, the hair of a goat turning the white rolls of his back a mottled red.  He’s been standing beyond the heat, reading his bible aloud and trying not to breathe through his nose.  He’s feeling vindicated.  He always said old Margaret was a witch, when she got confused in church and babbled of nothing.  While he stood high in his pulpit, glaring down, interrupted in full flow.  He never liked old women anyway.  They offend the eyes, he would tell himself, and are no longer any use to god nor man.  Men.

My familiar is waiting.  I swoop down to him, sitting in his cell, abusing himself, as they call it.  I perch on his windowsill, enter into his heart, shadowed and stained.  It serves my purposes, as poor brain-addled Margaret never could.  A witch’s familiar, they call me.  But who is the witch, and where his coven?  Is it on the hillside, where the druids met of old to dance and curse – or is it the abbey, where a hundred monks and their priests walk the patterns of my spells?

I’m hungry.  The gibbets hang full and ripe.  Such is the way of crows.

To celebrate the fact that my novel, Deeper, is on Amazon FREE for the next  five three days, I’m going to write a tale of dark fantasy each day as the moon sinks below the gum trees!  Join me if you feel in a fey mood, and I’ll link.  To read the latest review of Deeper, hop over to Tome Tender “When it comes to books, who needs shelf control?”.  Dianne has lots of reviews, book giveaways and freebies, and a truly gorgeous front page.

He’s got attitude

“You’re – what?”  She looked him up and down, arms folded smugly over nascent bosom. “You haven’t even got hair on your chest. Or like, sideburns!”

He scuffed a foot on the carpet, spattered with sparkles.  Jesus, he thought, girls’ rooms are so – girly!

“It’s not about hair,” he explained with a hint of frustration, “It’s all about the attitude!”

“Being a werewolf is about HAIR!” she insisted, playing with the curls of her Bratz.

“Well, I’ll probably grow more hair, when I’m older. LOTS more hair.  If you like that kind of thing.”

He thought he heard a thump.

“Are you sure your parents are out?”

“I wouldn’t have said they were if they weren’t, now would I!”

Such long eyelashes. Such fluffy pink socks.  Such – moronity.  If that’s a word.  Still, she’d invited him here, and they were all alone.  So she said.  He absentmindedly picked a blackhead, trying to decide if he should make a move.

“And that’s another thing,” she said playfully, to the doll.  “Werewolves are supposed to have sharp teeth.  And really big muscles.”  She looked disparagingly at the freckled, boyish biceps emerging from his short sleeved shirt.

“They do,” he explained patiently, “when they’re WOLVES.  When we’re in human form, we’re just like anybody else.  Only more – magnetic.  You know, alluring.  To girls.”

She laughed, a high-pitched snort.

“You sure do have attitude – for a werewolf.  But you’re cute in a way.  Want to kiss me?”

He cleared his throat.  Now or never. And leaned in for the kill.

This is the second of five ‘dark fantasy’ stories, to celebrate the fact that my novel, DEEPER, is on Amazon FREE for the next FOUR days.   Join me if you feel in a fey mood, and I’ll link.  Talking about links, PostModern Single has got a very intriguing list of questions over on her site.  What do you consider the most overrated virtue? When would you lie?  Go over and have a go – it’s very thought-provoking (plus, she is also advertising some good books).

My weight in icecream

Reblogged from Michaela Garnett:

So, it's come to this.

I'm watching hairspray in tears, a cup of tea on one side, my weight in ice cream on the other.

But I'm making myself feel better, because Tracy Turnblad had all her dreams come true and she was the size of a house. She also received zack effron.

This week I've felt SO down. I've had news that knocked me off my feet and now it's the only thing on my mind!

Read more… 372 more words

Michaela is fifteen, a writer, and feeling ignored. Her blog is a combination of heartfelt honesty and insight. Hop over there and have a look, she's a delight.

The Dublin Pub

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He caught a glimpse of eyes, soot-dark in Celtic cream.  There was something insubstantial about her. Or him.  He blamed the beer.

He raised his glass to her and she was gone.  Turned, and found her behind him, lashes shyly shuttered against his bold, woozy New York stare.

“You’re not from here,” he said.  Shouted, rather, against the Irish hum and roar.

She pulled at the silk shirt slipping from one narrow shoulder.  He, peering for cleavage, felt those smudged eyes crinkle with dark irony.  Called the barman.

“What can I get you?”

An American in Dublin.  Would she want Guinness, or whisky?  She – it must be she – turned a narrow, pale wrist towards him.  A sign, he had read, of feminine interest.  Or masculine?

“Neither.”

The barman poured two shots, one for each.  One earring, a four leaf clover set in old silver, dangled green as the liquid in the glass before him.  A Gaelic speciality?

Perhaps.  She drank, and watched him bring the glass to New York lips, too seldom still.

He saw her waver, ghost-like, a shimmer against the golden brimfuls and craic-drunk eyes of the crowded bar.  They stood alone in the damp moonlight, on Tara’s hill, burial place of kings.

She spoke, warm breath in his ear, tickling.

“I don’t understand. I don’t speak the Gaelic,” he said, thinking how very drunk he must be, not to remember.  And yet…

“Neither do I,” said the girl of faerie, breasts flat as a man’s under the silken fog, as she – or it could have been he – drew him beneath the curve of ancient ground.  For there are things older than male, and female, and they speak no language now known, in a Dublin pub.

To celebrate the fact that my novel, Deeper, is on Amazon FREE for the next five days, I’m going to write a tale of dark fantasy each day as the moon sinks below the gum trees!  Join me if you feel in a fey mood, and I’ll link.  To read the latest review of Deeper, hop over to Tome Tender “When it comes to books, who needs shelf control?”.  Dianne has lots of reviews, book giveaways and freebies, and a truly gorgeous front page.

Would YOU pull the plug on Nelson?

Nelson Mandela is on life support.  In related news, Saturday was spent discussing, erm…

End of Life.

AKA Passing Away

AKA Becoming Deceased.

AKA Going to Another Place.

In other words, Death.

This was a conference about Advance Care Planning – ie, do you want your corpse reanimated and fed lime jelly through a tube, or not?  In short, a whole roomful of people talking about what they’d like to be done to them, and not done to them, as they approach their final hour.  One craggy-browed participant, over coffee, stares around belligerently and declares,

I believe in personal freedom over my own body!

Well that’s interesting.  How about personal freedom to take hard drugs, not wear a motorbike helmet, that kind of thing?

Yes, absolutely, it’s outrageous that anyone can tell me I’m not allowed to smoke dope.

Everyone nods (me too).  Teenagers in the sixties, I guess.

And another thing, why should anyone be punished for looking at pictures! If I wanted to look at pictures of nude children..not that I do of course…anyway I suppose they’re nude, I wouldn’t know…..who would I be hurting? No one. Those pictures’d be there on the internet if I wanted to look at them or not!

Short pause for reflection.

Where there’s a buyer there’s a seller.  There are some markets you don’t want to enter.

Yes, well, getting back to death……Because it’s certainly more comfortable to talk about death than it is about kiddie porn!

I’m very worried about all this advance planning, says a Vietnamese woman. If I have a Plan, maybe the doctors will think they can get away with not doing EVERYTHING they possibly can to keep me alive.

You can put anything you like in your Plan, someone points out.  You can put ‘Don’t pull the plug on me until my head falls off’, if you want.

Anyway, put what you like, if your son the stockbroker who lives in New York but has flown back just in time to ask you where you put the will, says he wants you on that breathing machine, then on it you will be.  Dead men don’t sue.  Much.

That’s Love, says the Vietnamese woman. If it’s Love, then it’s ok.

Sigh.  I bet Nelson wishes he had a little less love and a little more consideration.  And here is a scary ad that ran in Australia a long time ago.  Wrong, luckily.

Reviews! Oh YES!!!!

I think I’m about to have an online orgasm…

What?  Why?

Because several people who are NOT my friends or relatives have reviewed my book Deeper – and here is what they said.

You’ve read the story, but you haven’t read it like this.

I was hooked from the first paragraph. The narrator’s voice is compelling, and she tells her story with a poetic simplicity. Melur is a Mer, an aquatic mammal who dreams of somehow escaping her pod and their way of life. Her quest takes her to the dry land and into the arms of a human man, where she learns that getting everything that you think you want can come with a price that is too high to be endured.

Yes, it is a retelling of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid”, but Thomson’s Melur is a unique character, at once romantic and savage. Her struggles to understand the human world and their strange creations, her desire for something more than life in the sea can offer, and above all her fierce, naive love for the human that she rescued from drowning blend into a voice that will haunt the reader.

The story is told in the first person, addressed to her human lover. This gives it an intimacy that draws the reader into her world. It is a powerful story, and I’ll admit that I cried at the end.

Highly recommended.

and

I’ll admit that I haven’t read any books about mermaids before. They haven’t ever been very interesting to me. I think Deeper might have changed that.

Within the first few pages of the book, I wasn’t sure if I was going to enjoy Thomson’s writing. There wasn’t anything in particular that made me feel this way, but I did. However, the feeling quickly passed and I enjoyed her writing throughout the book.

The story was well done. There were no boring parts or parts that felt unneeded. While I enjoyed it all, I absolutely loved the ending. It wasn’t what I was expecting and that made it so much better.

I don’t want to give anything away, so I will stop here. I do recommend Deeper. It was so much better than I originally expected.

Quite a lot of people have BOUGHT my book – which is wonderful, thankyou SO much, I love you all deeply, passionately and truly.  But many of you have not yet reviewed it.  Whether that’s because you don’t want to hurt my feelings (something I’m all too familiar with as a reviewer myself) or because you forgot – well, I don’t know.  But if you can, please do, because if there aren’t many reviews, people will think Deeper can’t be a very good book.  And it IS one, I just know it!   Ok, a bit of authorly overstatement here.

The thing is with Amazon, reviews are what takes a book from sunk-without-so-much-as-a-ripple to you-mean-to-say-you-haven’t-read-THAT-book-yet!!!  status.  So, if you’ve read it, you know…please???

Prostitution, Crime and Cinderella Man

Reblogged from Seeking a Small Miracle...A Job and a Home:

What would you do to feed your kids when you are living on the streets because I am running out of time and options?

I send out resumes every day, I keep my eyes open to Help Wanted signs, I follow up with empty leads just to have days fly by like weeks.

When the world turns their back what is there to do?

Read more… 106 more words

I have no idea whether this man is really in need or not, but decided to give a small amount because it's better to give and be wrong than withhold and be wrong. Plus, I've always felt the rest of the world should give more foreign aid to the poor old US of A.

Men!!!??

Are men really that gross?

To put this question in context, my (nearly 16) year old beauty-queen daughter thinks she knows everything there is to know about men.  Apparently, if you pretend to be a male gamer on a multiplayer site, you learn quite a lot about…things.  You can imagine.  Nerds. Hormones. Too much time on their.  Hands.

Men are SHALLOW.

They’re like, I’d never date a girl who looked like THAT.  No way would I ever tap a woman with an arse THAT size.  Blah blah. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, another Eligible Bachelor scratches his paunch and sniffs his armpit to drown out the last fart he let off.

And so Ms M’s like, “Maybe I’m not beautiful enough for any guy to ever date? Or..maybe they’ll date me even though I’m not goodlooking because they just want sex! Hell (she didn’t actually say that) I don’t WANT to date anyone!”

But is she right?

I say, “Honey,” (well I would if I called her that, actually I call her Ms Pinkerton Smith, for some reason) “that’s not typical.  Men are just like you and me. Some of them are nice. I’ve been studying Men for 40 years and you know, lots of them are really more into romance than sex.  Why, I remember the time when a guy walked out on me with a big sulk just because I said I was just in it for the bonking!”

But am I right?

So many men. So many nude 12 year olds. So many movies about teddy bears with odd predilections, and violated cold roast turkeys, and scooped out vegetables not even your depression era Grandmother would want to put in her stew.

Are men indiscriminate, shallow beasts who only care about one thing? Or are they not? Or both? I’ve got to admit, I don’t really get men.  Unless they’re like me, in which case it’s ok not to get them.

Anyway, have a look at these men in labour on Thought Catalog! SO funny! (cackle, cackle…). Even THEY laugh. Bless them. Men!

Oh and by the way, on Monday I did my first ever Guest Post, on From the Bootheel Cotton Patch (So many books, so little time).  Would you like Les Miserables to be a touch less miserable? Well, I would.  Check it out. Happy endings for all (and they’re free)!!

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